Yesterday I had the pleasure of joining journalist Mario Nawfal for an interview focused on the possible disruptions stemming from the regional war in the Middle East and which escalated very significantly with Donald Trump’s and Benjamin Netanyahu’s attack on Iran on 28 February 2026.
The interview hasn’t been published yet but Mr. Nawfal was curious about the way I saw this war impacting Western economies and financial markets. Well, it’s not exactly simple: to gain a better understanding of this situation, we must first consider its broader context. To be sure, this will almost certainly turn into a disruption like nobody’s ever seen before.
It would appear that President Trump gambled that the whole affair would be short-lived and wouldn’t significantly disrupt global trade. From the Iranian perspective, however, concern about Western economies and financial markets isn’t a priority. In fact, Iran might like to turn up the pain dial on Western powers; they have every reason to exploit their financial Achilles’ heel, keep the strait of Hormuz closed for a long time and exert “maximum pressure” right back against the West.
Short of deploying nuclear weapons, Western powers can do precious little to mitigate the new situation. And even if they did deploy the nukes, there’s a good chance it would only make things a whole lot worse. Iran is now in a position to demand very significant concessions to reopen Hormuz. They will be within their right to do so.
Iran did not seek this conflict. Their “aggression” amounted simply to refusing to be bludgeoned into submission by the U.S. We have to appreciate that Western colonial powers have harassed Iran for nearly 120 years now. They waged war against Iran, staged coups, and imposed sanctions and blockades that suffocated the Iranian economy and kept it from developing to its full potential.
In doing so, they unjustifiably prevented the Iranian people from enjoying the peace and prosperity they might otherwise have attained. But according to the Western narrative, Iran is the bad actor, not the West. The slogan, “world’s leading sponsor of terrorism,” is repeated daily for years, ad nauseam. The “mullahs” are among the most evil people in history, as Trump put it, right after killing Iran’s “chief” mullah.
Not to be forgotten, the Iranians force their women to wear burqas! Well, head-scarves at the very least! We in the West simply can’t tolerate this. Also, Iranian women aren’t free to supplement their incomes by posting on OnlyFans, nor are they free to be raped in their tens of thousands every year as women and girls are in Great Britain, for example.
The part that the Western narrative invariably omits is that the British empire lusted after Iran’s oil since 1901/2. Accordingly, they deployed troops to Iran’s oil rich regions during World War I, right after they arranged a mass slaughter on the old continent, between the Germans, Russians and the French. In August 1941, after occupying southern Iran, the British persuaded Stalin to invade northern Iran on the pretext that a handful of German engineers were present in the country.
This was done in spite of the fact that Iran had declared neutrality in World War II. The occupying troops, which included a contingent of American forces, requisitioned the bulk of Iran’s food supplies resulting in a famine that killed tens of thousands of Iranians. Epidemics of Typhoid and Typhus broke out. Britain’s strategy was a systematic humiliation of the Iranian people and their nationalist elements, which included forcing Iran’s Shah to abdicate in favor of his son Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.
Even after the end of World War II, Iran’s economy remained under the effective control of the British through the domineering Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, 53% owned by the British government. In late 1947, the Iranian government sought to increase its share of oil revenues. At the time, U.S. Standard Oil had a 50/50 split with the Government of Venezuela, but the Iranians calculated that they were receiving only about 8% of Anglo-Iranian’s profits.
In 1948, Anglo-Iranian made $360 million in profits from its operations in Iran. They paid only $32 million to the Iranian government. Invoking the principles of justice and fairness, the Iranian government demanded a 50/50 split. "Fair and balanced” BBC immediately started a campaign of smearing and demonizing the Iranian government while the British government stalled all talks and negotiations.
The Iranians had enough and threw all foreign troops out in 1948. On 15 March 1951, the Iranian parliament adopted a law on nationalizing the nation’s oil resources. In April of the same year, democratically elected Mohammed Mossadegh became Iran’s new Prime Minister. Within days, Great Britain sent its navy to Abadan where Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. operated the world’s largest oil refinery to prevent the Iranian government from asserting control. In addition, Britain sent land and air forces to British-controlled Basra in Iraq.
In September 1951, the UK imposed full sanctions against Iran including an embargo on all oil shipments from Iran and a freeze on all Iranian assets in British banks. All of the Anglo-American oil majors (the “seven sisters”) joined the British embargo effectively cutting Iran’s exports off from the world. Iran’s oil revenues collapsed from about $400 million in 1950 to under $2 million in July 1951. This precipitated an acute economic crisis and made the Mossadegh government vulnerable to a coup.
Mossadegh sought help from the American government, not realizing they were coordinating policies with the British. As a result, President Dwight Eisenhower turned down Mossadegh’s plea for help. By 1953 his government launched Operation Ajax, directed by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, the CIA chief Allen Dulles. In August 1953, they sent General Norman Schwartzkopf Sr. (the father of General Norman Schwartzkopf of the Gulf War fame) to Tehran.
The coordinated U.S./British operation overthrew Prime Minister Mossadegh and installed the puppet king, Shah Reza Pahlavi. By now, all this should sound familiar and all those observers who bray about Iranian women’s rights, head scarves and democracy should perhaps lay off the propaganda narratives and consider the broader historical context behind current events.
When Pahlavi began to turn uppity on his puppet-masters, they brought in the Muslim revolutionaries led by the Shia cleric Ruhollah Mostafavi Musavi Khomeini in 1979. Now they want to overthrow the revolutionary government and bring back another Shah Reza Pahlavi. If it were a movie script, I suspect nobody would find it credible, but this is what we have today.
The Iranians have been preparing for this conflict for more than 20 years and today, unlike in the past, they are flanked by powerful allies. They have suffered under “maximum pressure” sanctions for many years and have relatively less to lose in the conflict than the fragile West does. They will not be interested in a quick solution to this conflict and have no incentive to accept a settlement that would give their enemies an easy off-ramp.
From Iran’s point of view, the U.S./Israeli attack created an opportunity to remove all threats to their nation from the region, including the proxies of Western powers that include Israel, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and the UAE. All these creations of the past century of British geopolitics may have reached the end of the road and Iran has many reasons to push for this outcome and not let this opportunity pass. That would imply that the war won’t be over in days and may not be over in weeks either.
Iran could remain committed to a long war of attrition against the West and its local proxies and this will have a long-term effect on our economies and financial markets. We’ll address those questions in tomorrow’s report.
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By Independent News Roundup