Trump’s ‘ceasefire’ was undermined before the ink was dry. Israel’s assault on Lebanon, the collapse of the Islamabad talks and Trump’s blockade threat brought the region back to the brink. Several weeks later, the same basic pattern remains: no settlement, no peace, and repeated threats of renewed escalation.
Only hours after threatening to bomb Iran ‘back to the Stone Age’, Trump posted on Truth Social on 8 April that he would ‘suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks’. He claimed an agreement had been reached to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
Media reports said the ceasefire had been brokered by Pakistan, following a last-minute appeal by China to Iran to agree. But the exact terms of the proposed 10-point agreement were never clear. There was no single agreed version, and the gap between the competing accounts mattered enormously.
Within 24 hours of Trump’s announcement, Israel launched air strikes on apartment blocks in Beirut and other Lebanese cities. Iran claimed the ceasefire covered Lebanon. Israel and Trump denied it. Meanwhile, Trump, Vance and Hegseth competed to claim a ‘historic and overwhelming victory’. These accounts cannot be reconciled. What they do reveal is the real balance of forces that has emerged from the war.
Israel: saboteur by design
Israel’s assault on Lebanon was not simply a refusal to comply with a ceasefire it claimed did not apply to it. It was a deliberate attempt to destroy the US-Iran deal.
Had Israel’s aim been merely to continue the war in Lebanon and consolidate its occupation of the south, it could have paused the bombing temporarily and resumed once the situation had stabilised. Instead, it launched one of the most murderous attacks of the war, with scores of strikes in minutes.
There is a strategic logic to this. Israel’s offensives across Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza are not separate operations. They are components of a single project: the territorial construction of Greater Israel. Consent for that project requires a hostile Iran that can be presented as an enemy not only to Israel, but also to US interests. The moment Tehran is received as a diplomatic equal to Washington, the justification for permanent war and occupation weakens. A peace process does not merely pause Israel’s war aims; it contradicts them.
The same logic explains why Israel fought so hard to destroy Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal. Iran under the JCPOA posed no credible military danger and was meeting its enrichment commitments. The threat was economic and political: Washington was preparing to reintegrate Tehran into the global economy, and US capital was ready to follow. Netanyahu could not accept that. The drive to sabotage diplomacy with Iran is not an aberration. It is central to Israeli policy.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi put the immediate dilemma plainly: ‘The US must choose—ceasefire or continued war via Israel. It cannot have both.’ Vance claimed the ceasefire ‘never included Lebanon’. Yet Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif had publicly stated that the US and Iran, ‘along with their allies’, had agreed to an immediate ceasefire ‘everywhere including Lebanon and elsewhere’.
Washington has placed Iran in an impossible position. It cannot accept the exclusion of Lebanon without abandoning a core ally and the terms it understood to have been agreed. But it cannot walk away from the ceasefire without handing Israel the renewed confrontation it is seeking. The resolution — US pressure on Israel to halt — is the one option Washington consistently refuses to take.
Israel has made clear there will be no real let-up in its occupation of southern Lebanon and parts of Syria. Under cover of the war, settler and IDF clearances of Palestinian farms and villages in the West Bank have been stepped up, as has the IDF’s partition and near-total blockade of Gaza. Israel will continue to sabotage any serious peace proposal because its expansionist aims remain its overriding objective.
The terms contested
Iran’s proposals, accepted by Trump as ‘a workable basis’, covered five areas: a regional ceasefire including Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq; a navigation framework for the Strait of Hormuz; sanctions relief and the release of frozen assets; war reparations; and a commitment not to seek nuclear weapons.
A second version circulated by Iran went further, demanding outright sovereignty over the Strait, explicit recognition of enrichment rights, the termination of all UNSC and IAEA resolutions, and full US military withdrawal from the region. Washington would not accept any of that as a starting point, and both sides knew it.
The nuclear question remains the structural obstacle. Iran’s commitment not to seek a nuclear weapon has been its stated policy for two decades. The claim that it was secretly building one was always a political construction, not a finding of international inspectors. Iran had already agreed in negotiations in 2025 and early 2026 to cap enrichment at civilian levels under IAEA oversight — and was bombed before any deal could be finalised on both occasions.
The US demand for zero enrichment has no basis in the NPT and is imposed on no other non-weapons state. It is the language of surrender, not negotiation.
The limits of US power
The competing victory claims reflect the real balance of forces that emerged from six weeks of war. Iran’s closure and disruption of the Strait of Hormuz — through which a fifth of the world’s oil passes — was the decisive factor. What had long been threatened was now demonstrated: Iran could control access selectively, maintain its own export revenues and impose cascading economic costs on US allies across the Gulf, Europe and East Asia.
For Washington, losing effective control of the world’s most critical energy chokepoint was strategically unsustainable, whatever Trump claimed about US energy self-sufficiency.
Beyond the Strait, the war has confirmed what Afghanistan and Iraq already showed: US military preponderance no longer reliably translates into political outcomes. Despite overwhelming air power against a country with weak air defences, and despite full naval deployment in the region, Washington has not committed ground forces, has not forced the Strait open, and has achieved neither regime change nor unconditional surrender.
The post-Cold War ‘unipolar moment’ continues its slow-motion collapse. The war has also damaged what remains of US soft power: its claimed role as coordinator of the global economy and guarantor of international law. Trump’s conduct throughout the conflict, including public ruptures with Nato allies, has left the architecture of US-led order visibly strained.
After Islamabad
The Islamabad talks, held on 11–12 April, were the first direct engagement between the US and Iran since the 2015 nuclear deal. After 21 hours of negotiations, Vance announced no agreement had been reached. Iran said the US had been unable ‘to gain the trust of the Iranian delegation’ — a pointed reference to agreements reached and then destroyed.
The sticking points were enrichment and the Strait. On both, neither side moved.
Trump’s immediate response was to announce a US naval blockade of Iranian ports and the Strait of Hormuz, threatening to interdict ships entering or leaving and to ‘finish up the little that is left of Iran’. This is an act of economic warfare directed not only against Iran but against every state dependent on Gulf energy supplies. It carries a real risk of uncontrollable escalation.
The ceasefire has since been extended, but not stabilised. Israel continues to strike Lebanon. Trump continues to threaten renewed attacks. Vance says the US is ‘locked and loaded’. Iran warns that new aggression could open new fronts. The blockade remains in place. Diplomacy has not replaced war; it has become one of its instruments.
The fact that the US was forced, even temporarily, to the negotiating table marked a retreat and a political defeat for the Trump administration. It was an attempt to avoid even greater damage to the global economy, US hegemony in the region and Trump’s presidency at home.
But given the adventurist character of Trump’s Bonapartism, further escalation cannot be ruled out. If the imperialist and Zionist attacks resume, Iran has every right to defend itself. The working class and all the oppressed must fight for the defeat of US and Zionist aggression, just as they must defend Lebanon against Israeli attack and occupation. They must do so without giving any political support to the regime in Tehran or to Hezbollah.
What we demand
The mass movements—the millions who took to the streets in the US ‘No Kings’ protests, the global solidarity movement for Palestine, and the anti-war movements across Europe, Latin America and Asia—must intensify the pressure to stop this war. The failed talks, the blockade and the continuing attacks on Lebanon make that more urgent, not less.
In Europe, workers’ action should target sea and airports to block economic and military supplies to Israel. Trade unions and socialist parties must mobilise against Trump’s racism and warmongering. Initiatives such as the Global Sumud Flotilla, which aims to refocus attention on Israel’s crimes in Gaza, must be supported and publicised.
Liberation will never come from one of the world’s most brutal imperialisms, from an administration that opened this war with genocidal threats and is now enforcing a naval blockade. It will come from the organised resistance of workers and the oppressed—in Iran, Palestine, Lebanon and everywhere else the consequences of this conflict are felt.
We fight for:
- Immediate and permanent ceasefire across Iran, Lebanon, Gaza and Yemen.
- Full lifting of all sanctions on Iran; immediate release of frozen assets.
- No to the US naval blockade — an act of aggression against the global working class.
- Defend Lebanon against Zionist attack; defend Iran against renewed US and Zionist aggression.
- End the genocide in Gaza; end the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, Syria and the West Bank.
- Withdrawal of all US and Israeli forces from the region.
- Break up Nato, AUKUS and all imperialist military alliances; close their bases.
- Liberation for all the peoples of the Middle East from imperialism, Zionism and their own oppressive regimes.
