Were Trump and the IRI regime just performing for their bases? And will the performances resolve the crisis? Let’s take those questions one at a time:

Both the Trump and the Iranian regime have to satisfy their bases. For Trump, there were twin and contradictory pressures. On the one hand, there were the pro Israel fanatics who were pressuring Trump to intervene by bombing Iran. Then there was the contradictory pressure of the far right and genuinely antisemitic forces like Steve Bannon, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who strongly opposed the US intervening on the grounds that it would lead the country into another “forever war”.

This aerial photo shows trucks lined up outside the Fordo plant shortly before the US bombed that plant.

So what did Trump do? He ordered the bombing of the Iran nuclear facilities, the most important of which was the Fordo facility, which Israel lacked the ability to effectively attack. At this point, it seems more and more likely that Trump enabled Iran to get a several days’ warning for this attack. This enabled them to remove the nuclear fuel from Fordo. There are aerial photos of a long line of trucks lined up outside Fordo. US intelligence must have known about this in advance yet Trump did nothing to stop them.

And what was the trade-off?

The result of the Iran “attack” on the U.S. base in Qatar

In return, Iran warned the US, via Qatar, of when and where they were going to attack US military installations. This assured that no US soldiers would be killed. And since no US soldiers were killed, Trump could just ignore that attack, meaning he does not feel politically obliged to retaliate. That’s the end of the “forever war “line of attack against Trump by Greene and company. Those critics have been largely silenced.

How about the base of support for the Iran regime? Will they be satisfied? The whole basis of the Iranian regime is to build itself as a regional power that can challenge the power of Saudi Arabia and Israel in the region. All the talk about “death to Israel “and “death to America” was never anything but bluster meant to satisfy their own base, which is the Revolutionary Guard plus the Mullahs. The regime never did anything of significance to help the Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank. Nor did they ever do anything of significance to challenge US power in the region. Their base always knew that, so why should they not be satisfied with this performative “retaliation“ against the latest US attack?

The anti-war protest in San Francisco – unserious about actually having any power to affect anything.

The U.S. “left”
There is one more bit of performance, one more bit of theatrics involved, and that is the so-called “anti-war left” in the United States. I went to a protest of the same left in San Francisco on Sunday. There was all the hoo-ha about “Palestine will be free” and denunciations of US imperialism, and everybody enthusiastically cheered for those slogans. The fact that not a single speaker expressed any idea for how to bring those slogans into reality, the fact that nobody was listening outside of the few hundred people who were at the rally – all that is irrelevant. All that matters is that this “anti-imperialist left” could walk away feeling very happy. “We showed them“, was the attitude.

Meanwhile, Trump ignores Israel starving the people of Gaza to death while the Democrats offer pious words of “criticism” and the Arab states (& the IRI) do nothing.

Crisis continues
Of course, all of this is very far from the end of the story, even if Iran and Israel do reach a cease fire. Israel will continue to carry out a holocaust in Gaza and mass ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. It’s hard to see how on the present course tens of thousands of people in Gaza won’t be dying of outright starvation. All the bluster from Trump, the concerned words from the Democrats, and any fanatical, bloodthirsty declarations from Israeli politicians cannot hide this, and it must be causing enormous anger throughout the muslim world.

All Trump can see is what the government will do, or put another way, all he can see is what is on the immediate horizon. As is typical of all capitalist politicians, he just steers from one immediate crisis to another. The only difference from others like Biden or Obama is that the latter see six months or so into the future and Trump sees a day or so into the future. That anger will not go away, and if there is no government that acts, then individuals and individual groups, including terrorist groups, will act. It will not take very much for terrorists to commit act against US troops, not only in the region, but in Europe also. In fact, it will not take very much for terrorist groups to carry out activities within the United States itself. When that happens, the response will be an even greater crackdown, even more repression here in the United States. Under the guise of combating terrorism Trump will use such repression to attack both oppressed groups and the wider US working in class as a whole.

That is why people in the United States, first and foremost the working class, cannot escape the crisis in Israel, Palestine, and that region as a whole, and we cannot escape the consequences of the barbaric war crimes that Israel is committing.