This article originally appeared in Manila Bulletin on 28 March 2026. The text is reproduced below in full.
By Dr Nick Alviar
It’s March 28, and after four weeks of Operation Epic Fury’s relentless bombings and overwhelming firepower by the US and Israel, President Donald Trump claims that Iran’s military capabilities have been totally obliterated, and after the killing of Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and dozens of Iran’s senior officials, talks with Tehran’s key rulers are happening to end the war soon based on his 15-point demands for capitulation.
In fact, as early as March 9, President Trump self-assuredly declared “I think the war is very complete, pretty much” and that this is just a “little excursion.”
But wait, Iran is still fighting back, strategically and effectively. Its missiles continue hitting various targets in Israel, and its seemingly countless drones are causing destruction in oil depots, military installations, commercial centers, and residential areas among the American Middle East allies. In one critical stroke, it closed the Strait of Hormuz, passageway of approximately 25 percent of the world’s oil and gas supplies, sending energy prices skyrocketing all over the world. Power grids and desalination plants of the gulf states could be the next targets if attacks against Iran do not stop. Talks with Trump are fake news according to the Iranian leadership.
Meanwhile, many analysts, Mike Crawley of CBC News and Cason Ho of ABC News, for example, question President Trump’s shifting timelines and confusing objectives of the war: is it eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime? or destroying its nuclear program once and for all? or regime change? or Iran’s unconditional surrender? or as Secretary of War Pete Hegseth says—when he requested $200 billion additional funding from Congress last March 19—“it will be at the President’s choosing ultimately.” However, when Trump-appointed senior US intelligence official, Joe Kent, resigned as director of the National Counterterrorism Center recently, he declared that “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”
On the other hand, Iran seems to have prepared well for this scenario, and it has responded with a strategy that the aggressors failed to anticipate. It has attacked Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Iraq, Jordan, and Azerbaijan with missiles and drones sowing chaos, and widening the conflict around the region. While this could mean pressuring these countries to appeal to the US to stop the war which is creating much havoc to their economies heavily dependent on oil and fertilizer exports, tourism, data centers, and transportation hubs, these so-called American allies are beginning to doubt the reliability of the US as a guarantor of their security. So far, these Arab states refuse to retaliate directly against Iranian provocations, and are most likely rethinking now a better alternative in the long term of how to co-exist with a defiant, strong-willed, anti-Western neighbor.
Preferring not to confront the US and Israel head on, Iran has effectively responded with asymmetric warfare by firing missiles and drowning its enemies with almost endless, not-easy-to-detect drones, which are much cheaper and faster to produce than conventional costly arsenal and aerial bombardments deployed by the US and Israel.
Aware of the failed US adventurism in Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran is baiting the US to get embroiled in a long, protracted war that will exhaust the Americans of resources, lives, domestic support, and international credibility. Since the war began, the once impregnable Western alliance openly cracked as the UK, France, Germany, Spain, and others hesitate to join the war that is not theirs despite repeated requests from President Trump. Meanwhile, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jing Ping are subduedly watching in the sidelines as the world’s hegemon disregard the rules-based international order which may give them pretext to their own aggressions.
As the war progresses, Iran knows that the economic repercussions of a massive reduction of oil supplies from the Middle East are devastating to countries, industries, consumers all over the world, and the blame will be focused on the attackers who started this war.
Such strategies, resilience, and resolve to fight at all costs reveal a nation confident of its identity, and believes in its superiority owing to its glorious history that dates back to 550 BC when the mighty Persian Empire began dominating West and Central Asia. Since then, succeeding dynasties fought empires, developed Iran’s distinct civilization enriched by trade and cultural exchanges with other nations, and have embraced Islam since the 7th century AD. Anti-West animosities germinated when the British exercised control over Iran’s vast oil resources in the 20th century that eventually led to a UK-US supported 1953 military coup d’état to strengthen the rule of ally Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The reassertion of Iranian nationalism happened when Ayatollah Khomeini led the Islamic Revolution in 1979 with huge popular support and backed by the ironclad, ideologically hard core Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to send the Shah into exile. This is the regime that vows to defend the centuries-old Islamized Iranian civilization to the very end. Following Samuel Huntington’s perspective, can Trump win this clash against civilization?
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