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Open the Fucking Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH!’ Or we will ‘bomb them back into the Stone Age where they belong.’ So wrote Donald Trump.

Most people are used to political leaders speaking formally and behaving with some decorum. Elite politicians only started dressing casually or being photographed drinking beer in recent years because they wanted to look like common people. But the billionaire President of the US has taken it to a new level. He talks like Rambo and seems saturated with Hollywood imagery. Yet he gives the game away.

When he threatens to bomb Iran ‘back to the Stone Age’, he is talking about the nation of Iran – not just the regime. He reveals the brutality that lurks behind the new imperialist agenda.

After the horrors of WW1 and WW2, humanitarian codes were drawn up about the conduct of warfare. In reality, they sanctioned the continued use of war by the bigger powers. But the codes still included formal restrictions on attacking civilian targets.

Israel’s attack on Gaza, however, prefigured the new approach to war. They tried to cut off the very sources of life – hospitals, bridges, power plants. In southern Lebanon, the Israeli Defence Forces sprayed land with dangerously high levels of the herbicide glyphosate. Trump is applying the same methods to Iran. This is the real meaning of the threat to bomb them back to the Stone Age,

The difference between the US and other imperialists, such as Russia, which also attacks civilian targets in Ukraine, is the sheer size of its military power. Even before the war against Iran, the US ‘defence’ budget was €1.5 trillion, larger than the next nine countries combined. After the war with Iran began, Trump asked for another $200 billion. ‘It takes money to kill bad guys,” said the secretary of the renamed Department of War,  Pete Hegseth.

It is sometimes difficult to appreciate the sheer scale of the destruction. The single Tomahawk missile, which killed 175 children in the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school, cost $3.5 million. Yet the US fired hundreds of them in the first few days of the war to eliminate Iran’s anti-aircraft defences.

Each day, about 1,000 children die of water-borne diseases. As an emergency measure, many could be saved if they were given water purification tablets, which cost about €15 for 100 tablets. If there were an ounce of humanity, the money spent on the US’s disastrous wars could be used to stop these deaths.

Instead, the main beneficiaries of war are the big corporations that use it as an opportunity to show off their new weaponry. Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon), and Northrop Grumman are making fortunes. Shares in Lockheed are up 38%, and RTX profits are up 22% compared to last year. Even before the current war in Iran, five defence firms received $2.4 trillion from the Pentagon between 2020 and 2024.

War is not just good for US corporations. The EU has set aside €800 billion for its arms companies and is trying to shift away from reliance on US corporations. The main benefits will be corporations such as Thales, Rheinmetall, and Leonardo. Like pigs in a trough, the different EU contractors use their respective states to get a bigger share.

As the arms industry relies on public spending, it resorts to lobbying and bribery to win contracts. In the US, the big three spent about €24 million a year on lobbying, but it is estimated that they get a 653:1 ‘return on their investment’. RTX, for example, spent €2 million on bribes to win contracts with Qatar.

In 1902, John A Hobson produced one of the first studies on imperialism. As a liberal, he was horrified by war and thought it profoundly irrational, even from a capitalist point of view. Why not use resources for corporations which can compete effectively on the market rather than squander them on war, he asked. Imperial explanation, he thought,  could only be driven by the sectional interests of the arms manufacturers. This line of argument features in many American critiques of its military-industrial complex.

However, this ignores how wars are embedded in capitalism generally- and they have become increasingly so in late capitalism. The US is not just an imperialist power – it is a militarised society. And tragically, where the US goes, its allies in the Western Alliance follow.

Military spending operates both as a stimulus for capitalist economies and as a way of ‘burning off’ surplus capital which might otherwise find less profitable outlets for investment. In a globalised world, ships carry 85% of the world’s exports by volume and so military power gives states the capacity to keep shipping lanes open. (Although as the closure of the Straits of Hormuz shows, imperial powers can miscalculate). Military power is also used to gain access to critical minerals, which modern technology requires.

Late capitalism has produced a greater integration of private corporations and the military power of states. Instead of a traditional military-industrial complex, we’d now face a digital military-industrial complex. In its most recent wars, AI technology has been used by the US and Israel to target their enemies. Advanced cloud and satellite communications systems are used to gather information and execute attacks. No wonder then that Big Tech works closely with the U.S. war machine. For example, CIA awarded Amazon Web Services a 10-year contract, worth US $600 million, to provide cloud computing services to all 17 US intelligence agencies. Project Maveninvolved Google, Amazon and Microsoft in developing surveillance software for military drones. The Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability programme, which was worth about €9 billion, was awarded to Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle to strengthen the military cloud. And that is not even to mention notorious companies like Palantir.

Militarisation shapes almost every aspect of US society. Migrants who join the army are fast-tracked for citizenship. After serving three years, you are entitled to free college tuition. You get free health care and a housing allowance. These are not insubstantial benefits, so it is no wonder that many talk about the ‘poverty draft’.

Less well-known is how the US uses its soft power to promote its military. Ever since WW2, the Pentagon has vetted the scripts of any movie that involve the use of US military equipment.

So once again, Trump has just taken this to a new level, spending a lot of his time , tweeting and using Hollywood scripts. So he will ‘take out’ Iran and ‘bomb them to hell’ with ‘God on his side’.

Truly, we have entered a mad world which hides the reality of war behind the rhetoric of movies. Yet this mad world is called capitalism.