War in Iran: Weakened by the Midterms, Trump Takes a Wait-and-See Approach

“I would rather not destroy the rest of the country if possible, but maybe I’ll have to. You will know soon enough,” Donald Trump warned on Friday. Within days, his tone has changed radically: on Monday, the U.S. president said that “Iran, militarily, is effectively over,” noting that he saw “positive momentum toward an end to this Conflict.” In Tehran, officials say Washington is “manufacturing fake news about imaginary talks” and that Iran’s conditions remain unchanged.

Nevertheless, this change in tone marks yet another retreat by Trump, who has just suffered a crushing defeat in the midterms, as the U.S. electorate overwhelmingly punished the economic consequences of the war. While a resumption of the imperialist war would have run head-on into prevailing U.S. public opinion, Trump has chosen to strengthen the imperialist blockade. The Republicans’ debacle appears to have isolated those within the Trump administration who favor resuming a high-intensity war.

While Hegseth faces the threat of impeachment and spent most of his Pentagon press briefing — his first in six months — trying to defend himself, Admiral Brad Cooper, head of Central Command, faces opposition from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Marco Rubio, who believe that a new military campaign will not yield different results from previous ones, even if the United States were to significantly expand the scope of its targets. While the Secretary of State and the military leadership want to maintain the economic blockade and stick with the status quo — no war and no agreement — the faction led by Vice President JD Vance would like to finally turn the page on the debacle in Iran and sign an agreement with Tehran. For the vice president, this is undoubtedly a matter of preparing for the post-Trump era and distancing himself from this strategic fiasco.

For now, it appears that the faction led by Rubio has prevailed. On Saturday, CENTCOM announced the creation of Task Force Iron Gate, charged with gathering intelligence on overland flows of weapons and hydrocarbons at Iran’s borders. While Trump stated the following day that this was an extension of the naval blockade onto land — reinstated on July 14 — this announcement has all the hallmarks of a major rebuff to imperialism.

Far from ensuring that “very little gets into, or out of, Iran,” as Trump claims, this task force of about twenty people is primarily tasked with gathering information. It is possible that this intelligence will be used to pressure Iran’s neighbors diplomatically to close border crossings, or even to carry out military operations. But in reality, it has no means of taking action on its own. In the Caspian Sea, for example, the United States has no military assets capable of intervening against targets identified by the task force. Above all, it is unlikely that Iraq or Azerbaijan — the former out of fear of an escalation in Iranian militia activity, the latter due to Russia’s probable opposition to any military operation on its doorstep — would take the risk of collaborating with the United States or serving as its proxies.

Moreover, Trump’s imaginary land blockade starkly highlights the ineffectiveness of the naval blockade in place since July. While there is no doubt that Iran’s economic situation is deteriorating, that workers and the working classes are bearing the full brunt of imperialist sanctions, and that the regime is suffering significant revenue losses, the Iranian economy has for half a century been built almost entirely on circumventing crushing sanctions and has other avenues available.

However, we cannot rule out that Trump’s announcements are yet another ploy. At present, a third carrier strike group, led by the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, and a second amphibious group — comprising the USS Makin Island, the USS Anchorage, the USS John P. Murtha, and the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit (13th MEU) — are en route to the Arabian Sea.

On the one hand, Trump’s defeat in the midterms does not automatically reverse the trend toward the resumption of a large-scale imperialist war: Trump, who has already suffered a defeat in the class struggle in Minneapolis, a crushing military defeat in Iran, a defeat in Brazil with the chaotic exile of Flavio Bolsonaro, and a major electoral defeat, may seek to avoid another diplomatic defeat by signing an agreement that would ratify his strategic and military failure. On the domestic front, Trump has already made decisions that run counter to the lessons of the election: while ICE raids have alienated certain segments of the electorate that had turned to Trump in 2024 and caused significant vote shifts toward the Democrats, the White House has just appointed the deeply racist Stephen Miller — architect of the mass deportation policy and a white supremacist ideologue — as the president’s chief of staff.

On the other hand, maintaining the status quo — which allows Trump to avoid taking a stance for now — is unlikely to suit Iran. As Vali Nasr summarizes,

Trump has been weighing three options, war, deal or blockade which means continue with current no war and no deal status quo and hope Iran will cave. He is claiming GCC is asking for this but in reality he has been sitting in war plans he asked for past few weeks, not comfortable with giving the order to attack. despite letting Vance step up diplomatic efforts Trump is not ready to make concessions that would get a deal.

That leaves him with the option favored by in Rubio and Bessent, settle for economic pressure. But this is at best a stop-gap policy. And it is now up to Iran to accept the status quo and it has said (most recently in Supreme Leader’s statement) that it will not. Which means Iran will try to break the blockade which could escalate into more war. The question will be when.

In a recent article, we identified two other trends that threaten to disrupt the current balance. Netanyahu has more reason than ever to seek a new war in order to remain in power — now that Israeli President Isaac Herzog has tasked Gadi Eisenkot with forming a new government — while the Saudi offensive currently being prepared in Yemen could set the powder keg ablaze.

U.S. imperialism thus remains in a complete impasse: the strategy of economic coercion can only intensify Iran’s determination to break the blockade and thus return to war; judging by the latest U.S. offensives, a new campaign would likely end in failure, while Iran could strike far harder at strategic economic infrastructure across the region and disrupt not only the Strait of Hormuz but also the Bab el-Mandeb Strait; the opening of a new round of negotiations would undoubtedly result in tougher Iranian demands and could only lead to an agreement amounting to a U.S. capitulation. Faced with this impasse, Trump might thus opt for adventurism — whether through a ground deployment or even the use of a tactical nuclear weapon — to escape the consequences of defeat in Iran, which is accelerating the decline of U.S. hegemony.

The situation therefore remains uncertain. Nevertheless, this new phase poses an existential threat to the peoples of the region, starting with the workers and the working classes of Iran, whose living conditions continue to deteriorate as a result of the imperialist offensive. In this context, it is more important than ever to denounce the ongoing imperialist war and build a solidarity movement that firmly advocates for the defeat of the United States, while maintaining complete political independence from the Iranian regime.

Originally published in French on November 10 in Révolution Permanente.