US warplanes bombed Iranian coastal radar and air defense sites on Friday and again on Saturday, striking 10 targets near the Strait of Hormuz in the second wave.

The US attacks are the latest in a series of military escalations since the announcement of a “ceasefire” on June 17, when US President Donald Trump signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Iran at Versailles.

After ordering Saturday’s strikes, Trump threatened to annihilate the country. The United States, he wrote, “will be forced to militarily complete the job that we very successfully started. If that happens, the Islamic Republic of Iran will no longer exist!”

As he has done repeatedly, Trump is using genocidal language, threatening to annihilate a country and exterminate large portions of its population. As with his earlier outbursts, the vow to make Iran “no longer exist” carries an implicit threat to use nuclear weapons.

The attacks and threats come amid a deepening political crisis within the American ruling class over the ceasefire Trump announced on June 17. In the 11 days since, the deal has come under sustained attack from dominant sections of both the Republican and Democratic parties, which have denounced it as a surrender to Tehran.

Republican Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said it “negotiates away the victories” of the war. The Democrats condemned the agreement as having failed to secure the interests of US imperialism. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said that under the deal,“Iran is stronger and America is less safe.”

Over the weekend, as the bombing resumed, the demands across the political establishment for an escalation of the war only sharpened. On Sunday the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, a major voice of American finance, declared in its headline that “Iran Is Winning the Battle of Hormuz” and called on Trump to escalate. It dismissed the renewed US strikes as “love taps.” The regime, the board concluded, “is leaving the President a choice: surrender Hormuz to Iranian terror or fight for it, like he always should have once he started the war, and reopen the Strait by force.”

The debacle of the war has produced a deepening crisis within the Republican Party. Last week Trump berated the Republican senators who had voted to halt the war, and Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana shouted back at him behind closed doors. On CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Cassidy, who leaves the Senate in January, pointed to the extent of the defeat confronting US imperialism: “A medium-sized power at this point is perceived to have fought a superpower to a draw,” he said, “requiring some measure of accommodation of we, the superpower, and we spent $29 billion and we have 13 Americans dead. We hope to get back to status quo ante.”

In reality, Iran has inflicted substantial damage on the US military. The fighting escalated throughout the week: Iran struck the cargo ship Ever Lovely with a drone in the Strait of Hormuz on Thursday and a tanker carrying Qatari crude on Saturday, each drawing US strikes in return. Early Sunday, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard fired ballistic missiles and drones at the Ali al-Salem air base in Kuwait and the US Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain.

The Guard said it had “destroyed eight important infrastructures of the child-killing US army.” A US official told CBS News on Sunday that no Iranian missile or drone had reached its target and that there were “no U.S. injuries or impacts on U.S. assets.”

The statement is in line with earlier US denials about the extent of US military casualties. Two days earlier the Wall Street Journal had published satellite evidence that Iran’s strikes over the four-month war devastated the Fifth Fleet’s home base far beyond anything the Pentagon had admitted. The Fifth Fleet headquarters, a $200 million building, was left “no longer usable”; a dozen other buildings, two satellite communications terminals, the barracks and the main dining hall were hit; and rebuilding the Bahrain base alone, the paper estimated, would cost some $400 million. Across the region more than 20 US sites had been struck, with damage running into the billions.

The Pentagon sought to cover up the scale of the damage. The Trump administration pressed commercial satellite companies to restrict access to images of the destruction and declined to give Congress the cost. By mid-March the Navy had quietly evacuated 1,500 sailors and their families from Bahrain to Norfolk, Virginia, and the military is now weighing whether to rebuild the base, move its command centers underground or withdraw from the Gulf altogether.

Iran has also strengthened its hold on the Strait of Hormuz. Its foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi—Trump’s chief negotiating partner—declared on Sunday that under the agreement Iran alone is “responsible for managing the Strait” and that “no other country has any responsibility in that regard.”

The toll has been staggering. By mid-June Iran’s health ministry put its dead at more than 3,400, among them 376 children. Thirteen US troops have died, six of them Army reservists killed by a single drone at Port Shuaiba in Kuwait. The Pentagon put the direct cost at $29 billion; on June 24 the White House asked Congress for an $87.6 billion supplemental, most of it to replenish the military.

The war has engulfed Lebanon as well. Since the fighting spread there on March 2, Israel’s bombardment and ground invasion have left 4,246 dead and more than 12,000 wounded, the Lebanese health ministry says, and forced more than a million people—a fifth of the population—from their homes. By late April the Lebanese government had counted more than 62,000 homes damaged or destroyed, with entire villages in the south leveled. A ceasefire that took effect on April 16 never held: Israeli strikes continued through every renewal, five Israeli divisions remain inside southern Lebanon, and a framework deal announced on June 26 was rejected within a day by Hezbollah’s Naim Qassem as “null and void.”

Despite the scale of the disaster inflicted on US imperialism, dominant sections of the political establishment are demanding that the war escalate. In the face of massive and overwhelming popular opposition, US imperialism is on track to expand the war in the Middle East.