The U.S. Peace Council strongly condemns the outrageous, criminal and illegal attack on the sovereign state of Iran by the United States administration of Donald P. Trump. This flagrant violation of the United Nations Charter and the Nuremberg condemnation of wars of choice, should serve as a graphic demonstration that U.S. imperialism continues to operate beyond the boundaries of law, rejecting any accountability or constraints on its behavior.

The act of war committed by the U.S. against Iran comes on the heels of its violation of another red line of civilized international behavior by the U.S., when it treacherously pretended to be engaged in a diplomatic process with Iran as a diversionary tactic to facilitate a sneak attack on Iran by Israel.

The U.S. has tried to justify its illegal bombing as an act of preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons. But it is well known by now that Iran has neither any nuclear weapons nor has had any intention of developing such weapons — at least until before the current U.S. aggression on its nuclear facilities. The fabricated claim about the “threat” of Iran’s nuclear program is just a cover for a much broader objective of eliminating Iran as one of the main pillars of global anti-imperialist resistance and transition to a new, non-hegemonic, multipolar world.

For U.S. imperialism, the problem is not Iran’s nuclear program, but its determined resistance to imperialism’s regional and global hegemony. As both Bejamin Netanyahu and Donal Trump have repeatedly said, the real objective of US/Israel military aggression against Iran is a forced regime change and the partition of that country. Hence, the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities is not the end, but the beginning of an unprecedented round of aggressions in violation of the UN Charter and international law, which could lead to a much broader conflagration if not stopped immediately.

Imperialist domination is impossible without its core instrument of enforcement and control — state violence — with kinetic war being its most devastating form. The imperialist objective is regional domination of West Asia. It is therefore imperative that imperialist material interests undergirding war informs our understanding of the current violent attacks on Iran by the U.S. and Israel.

The U.S. instrumentalizes war to advance imperialism’s geostrategic and economic interests. The recognition of this fact should compel U.S. peace and anti-imperialist organizations to center their understanding that these interests are the driving forces for contemporary warmongering and the violence unleashed over the last few weeks against Iran. We urge the antiwar movement to embrace an anti-imperialist frame and language that strips away the official obfuscation of naked imperial interests with terms like humanitarian intervention, self-defense, or any of the other cover ups.

June 22, 2025