There appears to be a consensus among the experts of the world affairs that President Trump had neither considered any war strategy nor had he bothered to refer to Iran’s history before he embarked on his adventure in the Middle East. History bears witness to the fact that Iran in its long history had borne many an outside challenge, yet it managed to bounce back after every foreign encounter.
The US has other muscles to flex besides the military one. That is its economic might with the help of which the US had had its way in several disputes with one state or the other in the past.
In the 1970s when the US had been under huge debt it withdrew from the gold standard and managed to have the price of oil fixed in dollars.
Things further spiraled out of America’s control when Iran exercised total control of the Strait of Hormuz and fixed the payment of transit charges in several currencies. This development has raised many new issues for the United States. The petrodollar had become the pivot around which the politics of the Middle East revolved. This feature, too, has come under a strain resulting in the fissure of the defence pacts the United States has with the Middle Eastern countries. Only history will tell how much the world changes after the Iran-US encounter comes to an end.
Salman Nizamani, Karachi
Copyright Business Recorder, 2026
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