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The questions are innumerable. The search for answers, largely a waste of effort. The conflicting
claims by top functionaries of the Trump administration for why it went to war with Iran is all the evidence that is needed. The greater likelihood is that the Trump administration, as usual, has acted in this instance before cogitation. And this only renders the loss of non-combatant lives in Iran a bigger tragedy.
The ongoing war against Iran by the United States (codenamed “Operation Epic Fury”) and Israel has wrought considerable damage to the Islamic Republic. Even if arguments could be found for targeting the leadership and critical infrastructure of a belligerent state, collateral loss of life and limbs will always be difficult to walk by. “Was Iran a belligerent in this war?” is an awkward question.
Before this new outbreak of hostilities, there were three reasons why Iran engendered concerns in its neighbourhood. It had an advanced nuclear energy research programme and had enriched uranium to just below weapons-grade – unnecessary for civilian use, but, if you add the delivery vehicles fixes that are needed, still some distance from nuclear weapons breakout. It had a pretty sophisticated ballistic missile and weaponised drone capability. Then, there were its proxy armies in Lebanon (Hezbollah), West Bank and Gaza (Hamas), and Yemen (Houthis) – and their access to Iran’s missile stockpile.
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These are Iran’s version of Russia’s “Little green men” (the “polite people” with which the Kremlin seized Crimea in 2014) – able to inflict considerable injury on the regime’s enemies, while offering it plausible deniability were any such operation to go awry. Iran may, in keeping with the Islamic revolutions ideals, have conceived of this phalanx as useful against Israel and the Islamic revolution’s anti-American interests, but as the engagements between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis graphically underlined, and the retaliatory missile salvos that followed the US attacks reinforced, the Islamic Republic of Iran posed a general, present and real threat to most of its neighbours.
Between 13 and 24 June last year, Israel went through considerable trouble to degrade these threats. Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas in Gaza lost both their leadership and a lot of their ordnance. If you include the collapse in December 2024 of the Bashar Hafez al-Assad dictatorship in Syria, then, to add the adverb “extensively” to the extent to which Israel vitiated Iran’s proxy army is not an over-estimate. In addition, the US’ strikes in 2025 on Iran’s nuclear facilities arguably setback the regime’s breakout time for deploying nuclear weapons. And joint strikes on missile storage locations and launch sites shredded the Islamic Republic’s missile arsenal. On balance, the 12-day war in June 2025 emasculated the Iranian state sufficiently enough to lend wings to the recrudescence of sustained protests by civil society.
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This erosion of Iran’s fighting ability – today’s Iran quite clearly is not the existential threat to its neighbours that it was two years ago – is one reason some divine oil politics as the driving force of America’s new war against Iran. Especially after the US’ most recent military excursion in Venezuela, it is tempting to read the US’ recent attack on Iran as an effort to consolidate access to crude oil assets – especially given the Trump’s administration’s visceral antipathy to renewable energy sources. Or as an effort to deny China access to these assets. Unfortunately, the oil argument for invading Iran, for all its tight and seductive logic, is one with a lot of facts in annals past. At its most basic, it ignores the fact that the US has since become the world’s leading producer of fossil fuels. And so, it is not as dependent on shenanigans in the Middle East as it once was.
Ironically, by forcing Iran’s hands, the US may have done more to strengthen crude oil’s pass through to the global economy. Iran has tried to shut down crude oil processing facilities across the Gulf, and by threatening tanker passage through the Strait of Hormuz (about a third of global oil cargoes go through there), it has pushed oil prices up. Russia’s struggling war economy would be the the world’s leading beneficiary of rising oil prices. China, on the other hand, will hurt, especially given the quota of Iranian oil in its import mix. Still, can we ignore the fact that China generates an increasingly large amount of its energy needs from renewable energy? Or how this, again, underscores how far from crude oil the world has moved.
Rising oil prices will hurt nonetheless – by pushing inflation up across most economies, prices of fixed instruments down and their yields up (raising the cost of funding government deficits across the world), and depressing global output. Commentators have wondered how rising petrol prices will play with Americans. The “affordability” crisis that has dented Mr Trump’s Teflon-coated political persona in the US is the result of final demand worries amongst American voters. Would additional fillip to retail prices in the US worsen the Republican Party’s outlook in November’s midterm elections? Would a whipping of Iran’s army by America’s new war president help temper this downside?
The questions are innumerable. The search for answers, largely a waste of effort. The conflicting claims by top functionaries of the Trump administration for why it went to war with Iran is all the evidence that is needed. The greater likelihood is that the Trump administration, as usual, has acted in this instance before cogitation. And this only renders the loss of non-combatant lives in Iran a bigger tragedy.
Uddin Ifeanyi, a journalist manqué and retired civil servant, can be reached @IfeanyiUddin.
