An old and tried-and-tested military tactic of the weaker, since wars have been fought for thousands of years, is to try to outwit the stronger. And although they succeed relatively rarely, there are many examples of this - from the Greeks against the mighty Persian Empire in antiquity to Vietnam and Afghanistan in the last century.
Most recently, the war in Ukraine, which has been going on for more than four years with no end in sight, is clear evidence of this. When Russian troops invaded the neighboring country on February 24, 2022, few expected it to continue to resist successfully and to be far from surrendering.
Iran, which has become the target of another US-Israeli military campaign in recent years, clearly has no choice but to try to outwit its enemies. Especially since the goal of the US and Israel this time seems to be to overthrow the regime in Tehran.
The current operation is "of a completely different scale" compared to the 12-day war that Israel waged in June last year, said on the very first day of its beginning - February 28, the Chief of the General Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces, Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir, quoted by Agence France-Presse.
Yesterday, US President Donald Trump, who had asked to participate in the election of the next Supreme Leader of Iran, said that he was not happy with the fact that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed on the first day of the conflict, was replaced by his son Mojtaba.
So, the strategy of the Islamic Republic, by all accounts, is to resist and increase the cost of the war for the United States to the point of forcing them to give up. To this end, Iran seeks to sow chaos in the Middle East and block the Strait of Hormuz, which is crucial for global oil trade, France Presse summarizes.
According to a number of experts interviewed by AFP, this strategy has been carefully considered and the strikes on countries in the oil-rich Persian Gulf region fit into it, and are not the result of impotence or lack of ideas. On the one hand, there are American military bases in most of these countries, but this does not apply to Azerbaijan, for example.
And it seems that this strategy is working. After the initial shock and predictions that the operation in Iran will probably last a little longer than the one in Venezuela at the beginning of this year, worried voices began to be heard that the war could drag on for weeks and that oil supplies could be disrupted, plunging the entire world into an economic crisis. Yesterday, the price of London's Brent crude oil exceeded $100 a barrel for the first time in more than three and a half years.
"The longer the conflict drags on, the more Tehran is starting to feel that the strategic balance - psychologically and politically - is shifting in its favor," Dani Chitrinovich of the Israeli Institute for National Security Studies told AFP.
Dr. Burcu Özçelik of Britain's Royal United Services Institute summed up that "(Iran's) strategy is to put pressure on the Gulf states. The goal is to put pressure on Washington by provoking the anger of (these states) and causing the prices of oil, gas and other raw materials to rise."
So far, however, this strategy does not seem to be paying off. Gulf countries have widely blamed Iran for the missile and drone strikes on their territory.
"It will be difficult for (the Shiite and Persian Islamic Republic) to restore its relations" with these Sunni Arab monarchies, which had begun to improve in recent years, Özçelik predicted to AFP.
Moreover, Trump clearly showed yesterday that for the time being "he controls the narrative".
The US president announced that the war against Iran "is largely over", and assured that his country has "made great progress" in the implementation of his original schedule, which envisaged the military action lasting four to five weeks, Reuters reported.
It is significant that oil prices fell today after his statement, with Brent crude selling for less than $95 a barrel.
So, Trump has the luxury of always being able to back down, declaring that the military campaign has achieved its goal of inflicting serious damage on the regime in Tehran. In this situation, the ayatollahs' regime would survive, once again, but weakened and with much more limited influence in the Middle East. It is significant that the Iranian-backed Lebanese Shiite movement "Hezbollah", which has seriously resisted Israel several times in recent decades, this time limited itself to one day of more massive shelling, followed by heavy Israeli strikes.