On Tuesday, President Donald Trump met in back-to-back White House meetings with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to discuss the state of the US-NATO war against Russia and the US-Israeli war against Iran.

Zelensky traveled to Washington to secure expanded air-defense capabilities and a political endorsement from Trump as Kyiv faces intensified Russian missile and drone attacks and stalled diplomatic talks.

In a social media post after the meeting, Zelensky wrote, “The President and I discussed licenses for Patriot interceptor production and several other ideas that could help. We also spoke about diplomacy—it’s important that the diplomatic process be reinvigorated.”

Netanyahu’s visit was billed as a “high-stakes” White House summit focused on the next phase of the war against Iran, military operations in Lebanon and efforts to bolster the Abraham Accords, the US brokered agreements launched in 2020 to define formal relations between Israel and several Arab states—the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan—that isolate the Palestinians and have become an important bulwark of the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

Netanyahu, according to reporting citing Israeli sources, came armed with intelligence claims that Iran is expanding activities at the Pickaxe Mountain nuclear site and negotiating in bad faith, for the purpose of escalating the US military offensive and preventing any retreat from the catastrophic war.

The summit took place amid the growing crisis of the Trump administration over the military and political debacle unfolding in Iran. In a pre-meeting interview, Trump lashed out at Netanyahu, reportedly telling him in a recent phone call that he was “f—ing crazy” in relation to Israel’s operations in Lebanon.

Some US media sources described the Oval Office encounter between Trump and Netanyahu as an emergency “DC summit on Iran,” presenting it as a moment when “Iran’s future [is] on the table in Washington,” exposing the imperialist and neo-colonial nature of the discussions.

The meetings also had a domestic US political dimension, with Zelensky and Netanyahu proceeding to Capitol Hill to honor the late Senator Lindsey Graham, a staunch Republican supporter of Trump’s fascist political agenda and a rabid advocate of the wars against Russia and Iran.

The back-to-back White House meetings served to illustrate the intertwining of the two wars that was dramatically escalated several days before the summits, when Ukrainian forces struck an Iranian cargo vessel in the Caspian Sea.

Ukraine said its long-range drones targeted ships “involved in the transportation of military cargo from Iran,” including a warship and vessels carrying drones and missiles destined for Russia, presenting the attack as part of the NATO confrontation with Moscow.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry denounced the strike as aggression against a commercial ship, reporting that the explosion killed one sailor and injured at least one more, and accusing Kyiv of seeking to expand the Russia–Ukraine war into a broader regional conflagration.

This episode, on the world’s largest inland body of water which does not border on Ukraine, shows concretely how the NATO war against Russia and the US-Israeli war against Iran are converging into a single imperialist struggle stretching from the Black Sea and Caucasus to the Persian Gulf.

In the leadup to the beginning of his second term, Trump repeatedly boasted that he could “wrap up” the war with Russia quickly, promising that he would deliver a settlement in a single phone call to Vladmir Putin. In a similar vein, Trump insisted the war against Iran would not be a ‘quagmire’—like previous US wars in Vietnam and Iraq—but a short, winnable campaign. The President spoke of operations that will be “over in short order,” in a matter of weeks rather than months or years.

The reality, however, is that Russia has entrenched its positions. A June 2026 analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) estimates that combined Russian and Ukrainian military casualties (killed, wounded and missing) may be as high as 1.8 million and could reach around 2 million by spring 2026.

In Iran, US-Israeli strikes—which killed the leadership of the Iranian government on the first day of the war—did not result in regime change in Tehran. In fact, not one of the ever-sliding objectives stated by Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth for the criminal war against Iran have been achieved.

Far from offering an anti-war alternative, the Democratic Party’s opposition focuses on tactical disagreements over funding, duration and legal cover for the Iran campaign, while fully accepting the underlying strategic orientation of US imperialism. In many cases, Democrats are demanding that Trump finish the job and “win the war.”

Other Democrats have emphasized that the war‚ which a solid majority of the US public opposes, is further discrediting the US government and the entire American two-party political establishment. They warn that, “going it alone does not work,” and argue for a more multilateral and better-packaged form of imperialist aggression.

Viewed in context, the White House summits with Zelensky and Netanyahu, the Caspian Sea strike, and the bipartisan support for war in Washington reveal an imperialist offensive in which Ukraine and Israel serve as instruments of US policy in Eurasia and the Middle East. The Tuesday meetings have accelerated the intermingling of Washington’s wars and the mounting historic crisis of US imperialism.