Author: Daria Gușă
The entire world was shocked today by the war that has erupted in the Middle East — and I say the Middle East because, so far, the strikes have hit not only Iran and Israel, but also the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, and Iraq. Looking at the map, the only states left untouched were Lebanon, where the Israelis had already been intensifying their border attacks over the past week, Yemen, where a state of war already exists, and Oman, a country I have written about before as the quietest Gulf state, yet by far the most powerful when it comes to back-channel arrangements and mediation.
The first conclusion of today is that the Iranians had been expecting this operation since last summer, and they were not bluffing when they said they would respond seriously to any further attack. They already have the backing of Russia and China, though they will most likely not need the direct involvement of either great power. We know for certain today that they used primarily older weaponry, and the strikes in the coming days will be far more severe. The Iranians have stated clearly that they will continue their retaliation for as long as American attacks persist. We currently know that seven Iranian cities have been bombed by the Americans, including a girls’ school full of students, despite it being nowhere near any military infrastructure. From what I have been able to gather, no senior figures from Iran’s military command structure have been killed yet, despite contradictory reporting in the Israeli press. And even if they were, Iran organized itself long ago to survive the loss of any general or minister — its military is divided into at least twelve fully autonomous components. Despite the substantial American military presence, this will not be a war that anyone can claim a quick victory in. It will either become a prolonged, widening, and deeply destructive conflict, or it will end relatively quickly with a peace agreement but without regime change in Iran, which would seriously tarnish the image of the US-Israel duo.
The second conclusion is that Donald Trump did not know about this attack and never actually planned to strike Iran — that much is obvious from his statement issued in the middle of the night. First the official line was that Israel had acted alone; then we learned the Americans had provided support; then Trump himself appeared to announce that he had in fact orchestrated the entire operation. My reading is that the initial strike was organized by the Israelis with support from certain American factions — the CIA being the obvious candidate — and that the Americans were then forced to continue on their own once the war had already been set in motion. The fact that he once again offered justifications that have been debunked countless times by reality — the supposedly imminent threat of an Iranian nuclear weapon, invoked by Netanyahu on a monthly basis for 28 years, or the terrorism narrative around a Shia Iran that has consistently fought against Sunni terrorist organizations like ISIS and Al-Qaeda, groups that were themselves supported by the Americans through the CIA — suggests he had very little time to prepare any coherent rationale. The cherry on top is his open declaration that he is prepared to accept American casualties in order to counter this nonexistent threat. There has never been a US president in history who survived an election after sending Americans into a war with no genuine threat to America as its justification. The midterms are fast approaching, and for now there is only one conclusion we can reach: Trump will be politically buried by this war.
The third conclusion is that what is being targeted is the capital base of the Gulf’s rentier states: the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain. These small states had managed to attract enormous amounts of foreign capital, billionaires, entrepreneurs, and Western celebrities, precisely because of the brand they had built as safe, almost utopian enclaves in a region rich in natural resources but torn apart by war. In recent years, cities from the UAE, Oman, and Qatar had consistently ranked in the top ten of the world’s safest cities, and this was the primary draw for foreign businesspeople, particularly those who had grown weary of the daily dangers of the West’s more permissive democracies. Following the images of the Fairmont hotel on Dubai’s famous palm-shaped artificial peninsula that circulated online — still unconfirmed by the authorities, though at this point it hardly matters — Gulf capital is set to take a devastating blow. It should not be forgotten that Iran’s strikes focused more heavily on the military bases of these US-allied states than on Israel itself. One reason for this punishment may be the betrayal of the Palestinian cause, as Gulf leaders have openly enriched themselves through extensive dealings with Israel — which would also explain why Oman was spared. Another reason may be the prospective reshuffling of the „patrons” of these extraordinarily wealthy states: whereas they have until now been sustained and protected by Western high finance, Putin and Xi may today be positioning themselves to take over that role of controller and protector of states that are central to global business.
Further conclusions will follow in the coming days. For now, the central question is: what is the real prize in Iran? Why the insistence on these lies about Iran’s intentions? Geographically, Iran is one of the best-positioned states in the world, if not the best-positioned. It controls the Strait of Hormuz, through which approximately 20% of the world’s oil passes, a strait that the Iranians have already declared they will close, with potentially catastrophic consequences for the global economy. It is the single most important chokepoint on the world’s most important supply chain, and Iran has managed to maintain control over it — which is how we explain the geographical anomaly of that small Omani enclave above the UAE, sitting right at the strait’s narrowest point. An Iran governed by a compliant, US-friendly regime would be the equivalent of an energy switch that Washington could flip on or off at will in its dealings with rivals. The loss of that strait following the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the removal of the Shah remains one of Washington’s greatest geopolitical catastrophes. To this we must add Iran’s close ties with other Shia groups across the Middle East — most notably the Houthi movement in Yemen, which controls the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, the second most important chokepoint in the world, through which approximately 12% of global trade passes.
Second, Iran holds the world’s second or third largest natural gas reserves, with oil reserves placing it in the global top five. We should not forget the most consequential American coup in Iranian history, the one in 1953, when the CIA and MI6 forced into exile Mohammad Mosaddegh, Iran’s democratically elected prime minister. His only crime had been nationalizing Iranian oil, wresting it from the hands of the British Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, today rebranded as BP. Once the Shah was restored to power, Iran functioned as a provider of cheap energy and a market for American and Israeli arms, becoming one of Washington’s three pillars of power in the Middle East alongside Israel and Saudi Arabia.
On the subject of energy, the petrodollar cannot be overlooked. Since 1974, through agreements negotiated by Kissinger with Saudi Arabia, the world’s oil has been traded in dollars. The mechanism is straightforward: anyone who needs oil must hold dollars, which creates an artificial and permanent demand for the American currency, allowing the US to finance enormous deficits without the consequences any other state would face (I explain this phenomenon in more detail in my book The Geopolitical Power Barometer and the New World Order). Iran has traded its oil in yuan and rubles, and has signed bilateral agreements with China and Russia that bypass the dollar entirely. From Washington’s perspective, this is a direct attack on the financial infrastructure of American power. It is worth recalling that before the Iraq War, Saddam Hussein had announced he would sell Iraqi oil in euros, and that before the dismemberment of Libya, Gaddafi had proposed a gold-backed African currency for oil transactions. Both Hussein and Gaddafi had, until then, been American-backed figures.
Iran has been doing the same thing for two decades and, unlike Iraq or Libya, has the capacity to withstand the pressure of American sanctions. With a population of nearly 90 million, an imperial and civilizational history spanning 2,500 years, and a defense industry that developed missiles, drones, and cutting-edge air defense systems precisely under the conditions of an embargo, Iran is not another Iraq. There are, of course, genuine problems with Iranian democracy — but the sanctions imposed over the past 47 years and the current strikes are clearly not instruments of democratization. They are, in fact, the primary reasons the Iranian people suffer. A normalization of the Iranian economy has been unacceptable to the Americans, which explains the sustained insistence on the fictitious nuclear threat: as long as Iran remains sovereign, its return to full economic capacity — as a major global energy exporter and a commercial hub between Central Asia and the Persian Gulf — cannot be permitted. This normalization would probably not suit the Russians or Chinese entirely either, since they currently benefit from the profitable asymmetric dependency generated by Iran’s Western-imposed isolation. But I do not foresee the capitulation or collapse of the Islamic regime, nor a return to a loss of sovereignty. Any Iranian leader who accepted American terms in their current form — abandoning the nuclear program, severing ties with Russia and China, reintegrating into the petrodollar system — would instantly forfeit domestic legitimacy, given the national memory of the 1953 coup.
This war, therefore, has no geographically or politically feasible endgame for the Americans. It will clearly damage Western economies and US markets, given Iran’s concrete geopolitical leverage over global energy trade. The chaos unleashed across the entire Middle East can only serve a systemic reshuffling of serious capital in the region, and for now the only plausible winners are Putin and Xi. Trump and Netanyahu, who have cast themselves as the architects of this conflict, stand only to lose as long as this war cannot be won decisively and without American or Israeli casualties.
