U.S. and Israel Prepare Strikes and Land Blockade on Iran as Trump's Senate Grip Weakens
Power moves in the open now. The U.S. and Israel are preparing to bomb Iran's energy infrastructure, CBS News reported Friday, citing sources who said unconfirmed strikes could take place throughout the weekend. Days earlier, Trump and Netanyahu discussed blockading Iran's land borders to put more economic pressure on Tehran, MSNBC reported. The two reports are not separate episodes; they are the kinetic and financial arms of a single campaign to crush a sovereign economy by any means necessary.
The CBS account describes a plan to target "energy-related infrastructure" — the arteries of Iranian daily life, industry, and defense. The MSNBC account reveals the diplomatic corollary: a land blockade discussed at the highest level to "put more economic pressure on Tehran." Together they illustrate how imperial power operates: the bomber and the banker coordinate in real time, the military option and the sanctions regime advancing as one pincer movement. No congressional vote, no UN mandate, no pretense of law. Just two executives deciding who gets electricity and who gets starved.
This coordination extends beyond the two capitals. Leaked emails reviewed by The Grayzone show both a current and former MI5 director secretly lobbied for the British government's move to label the IRGC a terrorist entity as well as the UK's adoption of the draconian National Security Act. The architecture of coercion is multinational, bureaucratic, and deliberate.
The escalation unfolds while the architect of the pressure campaign faces open revolt at home. Sen. John Fetterman (D-Penn.) pointed to weaknesses in President Trump's influence in Congress amid opposition from three outgoing Republican senators to the president's nomination of acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to a permanent role overseeing the Justice Department. A president who cannot confirm his own pick for the nation's top prosecutor nonetheless commands the machinery to plan joint strikes with a foreign government and redesign another nation's borders by blockade. The contrast is not irony; it is structure. Foreign war remains the one domain where the executive still moves at speed, unchecked by the fracturing coalition behind him.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration plans Sun Belt water cuts — a domestic austerity measure targeting working-class communities in the Southwest. The resources for blockade design and bombing runs are limitless; the water for poor families is negotiable. The same logic governs both: capital protects its interests abroad and enforces scarcity at home.
The targets in Iran are not abstract. Energy infrastructure means the systems that run hospitals, water pumps, transport, heating. A land blockade means closing the roads and rail that bring food, medicine, raw materials. The victims are the Iranian working class, the rural poor, the families who lose refrigeration in extreme heat. This is collective punishment engineered at the level of physical survival.
Netanyahu gets a free hand to expand his regional war; Trump gets a distraction from a Senate that no longer salutes. The coordination is the message: the U.S. will supply the intelligence, the munitions, the diplomatic cover, and now the blockade design. Israel supplies the trigger finger. The rest of the world watches, waits, and records the precedent. When power decides that energy grids and border crossings are legitimate levers of coercion, no population is safe from the same logic. The Iranian people pay first. The principle established will travel.