How Iran is Winning the War

Many of us observing this unjust war imposed on the revolutionary Islamic Republic of Iran are getting our reports from the global corporate media outlets that historically manufacture consent in favor of their financial and political sponsors on the side of the aggressor -- namely the Genocidal Entity in Occupied Palestine (GEOP) and their loyal and equally genocidal and supremacist American minions and attack dogs.

They do so by sourcing and deploying intellectually dishonest, rather than credible and fair-minded analysts. By either devaluing or simply omitting perspectives that challenge their intellectually dishonest narratives, they aim to benefit a particular ecosystem of power and its nodes that patronize those propaganda and disinformation outlets from multiple sectors and directions, especially in times of perpetual wars for profit and power.

Driven by the typically uncritical acceptance of those narratives, everyone tends to count missiles, monitor sirens, and observe the spectacular launch of interceptors.

However, not many are performing the critical calculation that genuinely indicates who is winning this conflict regardless of kill counts or territorial control.

Here is the statistic that will generate the discomforting combination ranging from shock and disbelief to cognitive dissonance with a powerful dose of confirmation bias.

Emerging facts indicate that Iran is currently earning more per barrel of oil than it did before the first missile was launched by the GEOP-American nexus. The current 10-day “pause” in the name of “continued negotiations” is happening when the 10-year Treasury yield crossed 4.4% with the no man's land at 4.5%.

Naturally, the American minions of GEOP are desperately worried that the economy will really fail. This clearly suggests that their decisions are tied to the financial market and that this war is also a financial instrument.

Either way, a lucrative revenue stream for Iran has been generated not in spite of the war on Iran, but as a result of it. Bloomberg reported on March 26 that Iran has been selling crude oil to China at the narrowest discount to Brent in over ten months.

Brent crude closed on Friday, March 27 at US$112 a barrel. That is a 51% increase in a single month. This 51% is not a ceiling, it is the floor in light of the escalating reality without a visible off-ramp for the aggressors. Additionally, Brent crude range surpassed US$119 a barrel, which is more than 100% above pre-war levels over 52 weeks.

The previous record for a disruptive surge was 46% in 1990 when the same aggressors attacked Iraq for the first time. This time however, it is not a disruption. It is a structural fracture in the energy ecosystem that held the world economy together since 1973. It is the most severe such shutdown in the history of the modern energy market that took only 30 days to take shape.

Unlike 1990, this is a criminal campaign against an anti-imperialist revolutionary Islamic republic established and sustained by popular sovereignty. It is a war against Iran and its allies of the Muqawama capable of controlling two of the most consequential choke points in global energy and other commodities -- namely, the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, and the Bab Al-Mandab Strait connecting the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden.

As of today, tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has dropped by 97% since the aggression started on February 28. Recent Ansarullah attacks indicate similarly dramatic decline in tanker traffic across the Bab Al-Mandab Strait soon enough.

It was also the week when Goldman Sachs raised its US recession probability to 30% with an increasingly high probability of an upward trajectory. Privately, their analysts speaking to institutional clients are modeling scenarios where an increasingly likely prolonged closure pushed the price oscillating between US$112 and US$200 with both choke points compromised, as 10 million barrels of daily oil production from Kuwait, Iraq, Saudi, and other Gulf fiefdoms disappears entirely.

The US$200 scenario will lead to American gas prices breaching US$10 per gallon nationwide. The S&P will lose 15% or more within 48 hours of a confirmed full closure. The Federal Reserve will face the most impossible monetary policy dilemma since the stagflation of the 1970s: Raise rates to fight inflation caused by those energy prices or cut rates to fight the recession also caused by the same energy prices?

Europe will enter a technical recession before the summer as global food prices also spike because sulphur and urea fertilizer exports from the Gulf, representing 50% of the global supply, remain blocked.

All of this naturally coincided with the week the IEA described this as the worst energy security crisis ever recorded.

Currently, the aggressor is spending US$650,000+ for each interceptor missile, the side resisting their aggression is deploying drones at a cost of US$20,000+ each.

The financial implications of this asymmetric exchange are more than likely to fund the next 84 waves. This is not a coincidence; it is a strategic decision in the revolutionary Islamic Republic’s master class in asymmetric warfare with real life military, geographic, and economic consequences their arrogant adversaries underestimated.

In this brief, I will discuss how this actionable strategy operates, why the GEOP-American air defense did not fail due to technological failures but rather due to mathematics, what Russia's role in drone production means for the trajectory of the conflict, and why a fertilizer supply shock that is currently not being discussed is set to impact food prices across the Northern Hemisphere by September of this year.

Strategy Unpacked: Iran

The revolutionary Islamic Republic’s asymmetric strategy is informed by an attrition architecture that involves coordinated salvos for maximum exposure and surgical penetration informed and tempered by the particular phase of a war brutally imposed on its people and its allies in the region.

By deploying new and highly advanced weapon systems within those contextualized salvos, Iran is rewriting the rules of military engagement designed to bankrupt the genocidal GEOP-American defense infrastructure whilst simultaneously choking the global energy supply.

They are not only attacking the enemy’s weapons, but also the enemy’s force multipliers in order to degrade and subvert their capability to militarily, politically, and economically wage war according to their assumptive timeframes.

For example, by ensuring that the GEOP-American enemy does not have a single fully intact, fully operational  air strip anywhere in the Persian Gulf region capable of sustaining continuous drone reconnaissance missions, a battlefield reality as of Thursday March 26th -- Iran damages the enemy’s aerial infrastructure so that they cannot see what’s coming next.

Iran achieved this by not launching waves of ballistic missiles and waves of trackable salvos with predictable arcs the GEOP-American defense batteries are designed to neutralize. Instead, the IRGC opened with a single Shahed drone flying low along the Persian Gulf coastline slipped underneath the radar coverage envelope of a tactical operations center operated by the enemy.

Undetected, it triggered alarm, and subsequently no interceptor battery engagement. The drone found the exterior wall of the building and detonated inside, causing multiple casualties. The dignified enemy protocol that followed completed the distraction.

Leveraging the misdirection, the IRGC opened with a saturation attack that deployed Shahed-136 loitering munitions, 11 to 12 foot wingspans, a 110lb warhead in the nose, preloaded GPS flight paths, flying low, flying slow in swarms of 40, 60, sometimes 80 drones at a time.

Once those swarms started flooding the enemy’s defense perimeter, forcing the enemy’s defense systems into maximum tempo engagement cycles, burning through highly expensive interceptor magazines, the radar operators were simply overwhelmed with target overload. Then, in the widow meticulously engineered by the chaos, the Fateh-313 came in to completely destroy the target.

Cluster munitions add another winning dimension to Iran’s strategic defense by executing successful attrition. Cluster munitions are not precision weapons.

Precision weapons are built to hit one specific target with minimum collateral effect. Cluster munitions are built to saturate an area, to create dozens or hundreds of simultaneous impact points across a broad geographic zone, to overwhelm point defense systems, to force a defender to respond to simultaneous threats at once rather than a single concentrated strike.

Iran deploys them as a clear and present statement through a weapons system, rather than a diplomatic communique, that a seismic change in the rules of engagement is necessary in light of the existential crisis of its popular sovereignty as a revolutionary society.

The Iranian strategic doctrine that has governed its use of military force for four decades is built on that single principle. That principle is executed not by emotion or panic but an elegantly crafted calibrated response in agile phases designed to quickly adapt to battlefield dynamics, and overcome that existential crisis in order to defend, maintain, and enhance its popular sovereignty.

Driven by a diligently engineered cost imposition strategy, this exemplifies but one bespoke operation within highly sophisticated systems warfare that reinforces strategic attrition and asymmetry, and by doing so, delivers the decisive combination of psychological, moral, and tactical victory by “not losing” as a severely sanctioned yet somehow emerging economy from the Global South.

Iran is demonstrating just how well prepared they were for this war against nuclear superpower adversaries who were carefully stewarded to underestimate the cohesive synergy of their strategic, intelligence, institutional, industrial, and military capabilities required to successfully execute this defensive, asymmetric, and well-rehearsed war of attrition.

In other words, Iran is executing a deliberate, coordinated, multi-layered military campaign designed to impose maximum costs while protecting its most critical assets -- until the overall cost of aggression far exceeds whatever “benefit” imagined by the aggressors.

Strategy Unpacked: GEOP-America Nexus

Together, the Genocidal Entity in Occupied Palestine and its American puppets are following a strategic logic of their own, targeting nuclear and ballistic infrastructure to prevent Iran from emerging from this war with the ability to produce a weapon that would permanently alter the regional balance of power, whilst attempting to terrorize the Iranian people into “regime change” by literally destroying their families and the civil infrastructure their lives depend on.

The strategic logic of the GEOP-American aggressor was clean and confident. They had done something like this before. Back in June of 2025, a 12-day precision air campaign had dismantled the crown jewels of Iran's nuclear program at Natanz and Isfahan. The playbook worked, so they ran it again bigger this time with a political objective layered on top of the military one.

In the opening hours of the February campaign, they eliminated Ali Khamenei himself as the key component of their Decapitation Strategy. His son Mojtaba was elected as the new Leader of the Islamic Revolution. He was assessed as injured and disfigured by the otherwise fatal attack on his immediate family, and thereby more fragile, more politically isolated, and more susceptible to pressure.

Hezbollah had already been degraded into a shadow of its former capability after two years of Israeli campaign strikes. Hamas had been dismantled piece by piece.

On paper, Iran was more exposed than at any point since the 1979 revolution. The math added up. Every projection made sense.

In other words, the math looked perfect on a spreadsheet right up until the moment it destroyed everything. The math proved to be catastrophically and fundamentally wrong because Iran did not fight the way the war games predicted.

Now the United States is caught between its commitments to GEOP master, its relations with Gulf minions, its domestic politics, and the physical reality of having hundreds of soldiers in range of Iranian missiles and Special Forces.

Most people who never test their assumptions tend to uncritically accept the GEOP-American narrative. They see things the same way. Iran fires. The GEOP intercepts. America provides intelligence support, the occasional diplomatic warning, and bombs to please its boss. Repeat until someone blinks.

That's the frame. That's what the headlines are feeding us every morning. And most of them are factually accurate, at least from a super high level perspective.

That said, none of these positions are simple. None of these decisions are easy. Now the GEOP-American aggressor knows that come tomorrow morning and many mornings after that, there will be another series of well thought-out and agile waves adapting to the changes brought about by each new wave.

Because the scale of what's happening deserves a proper accounting before we interrogate what it means. Including March 26, we witnessed 84 synergized attack waves, each with a unique purpose.

At 26 days into a campaign designed to last 12, the United States and their GEOP boss have struck approximately 6,000 targets across Iranian territory. In response, Iran has launched over 18,800 drone attacks and 357 ballistic missile strikes against the UAE alone.

Add GEOP, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan -- and what emerges is not a decisive air campaign but an astronomically expensive war of attrition against an opponent that has been preparing for exactly this fight for years.

Here are the real numbers leading up to the inflection point discussed below.

The Pre-Inflection Waves

On March 25 alone, 9 waves struck the GEOP in a single day. Four targeted greater Tel Aviv. Four hit the south. One struck the north. According to GEOP Occupation Forces tracking data, roughly 40% of all incoming fire since the war started, has been aimed at one metro zone, greater Tel Aviv, home to 4 million people.

That's not random. That's a targeting doctrine. The revolutionary Islamic Republic isn't mixing weapons by accident. It's combining ballistic missiles and Shahed-type Kamikaze drones inside the same salvos, deliberately varying speeds, altitudes, and flight paths so that no single defense layer can track everything at once.

The 81st wave alone hit more than 70 separate targets across GEOP simultaneously. Haifa, Beersheba, and both sides of Tel Aviv. The 82nd wave targeted what Iran's IRGC publicly called military command and control centers and nuclear linked industries.

That is not a country firing randomly out of rage. That's a country executing a coordinated attrition doctrine. On the genocidal Apartheid Entity’s side, the numbers are equally devastating.

Each David's Sling interceptor deployed by the GEOP costs US$320,000. Each A3 costs US$650,000. Iran's Shahed drones run somewhere between US$20,000 and US$30,000 per unit. Iran has launched more than 3,000 of them since February 28.

The GEOP has spent at least five to ten times more money per engagement than Iran spends on the weapon that triggered it. Every single intercept is a net financial win for Iran.

Now, the infrastructure damage, this is where the surface story gets genuinely alarming, regardless of which side we’re following.

The Bazan Group oil refinery in Haifa Bay is one of the GEOP’s most important industrial complexes. Jet fuel for the air force, diesel for armored vehicles, gasoline for civilians. Iran's military has publicly stated it is targeting fuel depots used by the GEOP's fighter jets and shipyards maintaining naval vessels for eastern Mediterranean operations.

On March 19, six separate missile barges hit northern region of the GEOP in one day. The Bazan refinery took damage. Its second strike in under a year. No less than 12 fire and rescue teams deployed. The refinery disclosed to the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, that critical infrastructure belonging to the GEOP’s Natural Gas Lines Company, the gas system that powers Bazan's production units, had been damaged.

Professor Marcelo Sternberg at Tel Aviv University has publicly described the facility as a time bomb. He warned that a direct hit on the primary distillation units could release toxic clouds severe enough to force mass evacuation across the entire Haifa Bay area.

The GEOP’s shelter situation deserves its own paragraph.

Tel Aviv municipality official Shai Gateno told the Knesset that 11% of the city's residents cannot reach a certified shelter within a reasonable time during a siren. That’s 11% of a major city under daily bombardment. South Tel Aviv shelters are overcrowded, vandalized, and in some cases dangerous to enter. The city has 560 fixed protection facilities and 20 portable shelters. It is not enough.

That is an accurate picture of a country absorbing serious damage, burning through interceptors at catastrophic cost, with civilian infrastructure degrading in real time.

But here's where the standard analysis stops and where the actual story begins. Because there's one number almost nobody is putting next to the missile count. One data point that reframes every exchange, every intercept, every burning refinery, every Goldman Sachs recession warning.

The Strait of Hormuz has been functionally sealed since the Revolutionary Islamic Republic closed it on March 4. Tanker traffic has dropped to almost nothing. Brent crude has risen more than 60% above pre-war levels. The IEA has called this the worst energy security crisis on record.

Iran, the country absorbing more than 8,000 air strikes, confirmed by US Central Command General Brad Cooper, is the only major oil exporter still pumping crude through that Strait. They're not just surviving the disruption. They designed it to transform the disruption into a structural crisis they can leverage.

Before February 28, Brent crude sat between US$69 and US$72 a barrel. By March 20 it had surged past US$116. By March 26, it topped US$118. On its worst single day, it briefly crossed US$119, more than 60% above pre-war levels.

The Strait of Hormuz carrying roughly 20% of global oil consumption has been functionally closed. Qatar Energy declared force majeure on all liquefied natural gas contracts. European gas prices surged more than 20% in a matter of weeks.

The world is paying an energy war premium, a massive one, a historic one. And Iran sells oil. Bloomberg reported on March 26 that Iran has been selling crude, mostly to China, at the slimmest discount to Brent in over 10 months. Not at a wartime fire sale discount.

At near market price in a market Iran's own military operation has pushed to a multi-year high. The IEA is calling this the worst energy security crisis ever recorded. Iran is under that crisis earning hundreds of millions of dollars in extra revenue.

This is what it actually means structurally. The GEOP-American nexus is spending US$320,000 per David Sling interceptor. US$650,000 per A3. The US Congress is looking at a potential supplemental war appropriation of up to US$200 billion. Iran launched 3,000 plus drones at roughly US$20,000 to US$30,000 each.

Six American service members have been confirmed killed as several killzones await them within the Strait and its shores. An F-35 made an emergency landing on March 19th after a suspected hit by Iranian forces.

The asymmetry is not just tactical. It is financial. It is existential. Iran has engineered a situation where every missile it fires costs a fraction of every missile The GEOP-American nexus fires back and simultaneously drives up the price of the one export keeping Iran's economy alive. This is not luck. It requires a moment of intellectual honesty to acknowledge it. This is coherent strategy.

And now Russia. Most people covering this conflict frame it as Iran versus the GEOP with American air and hot air support on the margins. That framing is missing a third actor whose fingerprints are on nearly every upgraded weapon system Iran has deployed since this war began.

Western officials and analysts quoted in the Financial Times confirmed that Russia has been helping Iran with intelligence and with improved drones know-how, specifically upgraded Shahed type systems assessed as materially more capable than earlier Iranian versions.

Analyst Antonio Gustozi told the Financial Times directly, "Iran doesn't need more drones, it needs better drones." And that is what Russia is providing. Scholar Nicole Grafski confirmed those Russian variant drones already exceeded what Iran was manufacturing domestically.

An Atlantic Council analysis found that nearly 90% of all Shahed assembly now takes place inside Russia. Iran designed the weapon. Russia industrialized the production line. And now Moscow is shipping the upgraded version south.

On March 18, the GEOP’s air force struck Bandar-e Anzali, a port city on Iran's Caspian Sea coast. This was their military strike ever conducted in the Caspian. They destroyed an Iranian Navy corvette, four missile boats, multiple auxiliary vessels, a naval command center, and a shipyard.

US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth identified Bandar-e Anzali as the primary corridor for Russian weapons flowing into Iran. In 2023 alone, Iran moved more than 300,000 artillery shells and 1 million rounds of ammunition to Russia through that corridor. Now, the pipeline runs south. Upgraded drones and equipment flowing from Moscow to Tran.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitri Pescov warned Russia would view further military escalation in the Caspian extremely negatively. Maria Zakarova, Russia's foreign ministry spokeswoman, called Bandar-e Anzali an important logistics hub supporting Russian-Iranian trade. Ukraine's president Zelensky said on March 24th that Kiev has irrefutable evidence Russia is actively helping Iran strike American positions across the region. This is not a two-sided war.

It is a three-actor conflict where one actor is invisible in most Western coverage. One is absorbing billions in military spending. And one, the one everyone assumes is losing, is watching its national revenue climb with every interceptor the GEOP-American nexus fires. That's the layer underneath. Here's what almost nobody's talking about. Fertilizer.

The global fertilizer market right now is going to hit food prices in ways that most financial coverage hasn't caught up to yet. It connects directly back to every missile fired at the Bazan refinery. The Gulf region supplies roughly 45% of global sulfur. Asian nations alone depend on Gulf producers for 35% of their Urea, 53% of their Sulfur, and 64% of their Ammonia.

These are not commodities you can substitute overnight. These are the chemical inputs that go into the fertilizers that go into the food that gets planted in the northern hemisphere spring window. That planting window is right now, March, April, and May.

Morning Star analyst Seth Goldstein has projected that nitrogen fertilizer prices could double from 2024 levels as a direct result of this supply disruption. Double from an already elevated baseline, landing in the middle of the spring planting window across North America, Europe, and South Asia.

California gasoline crossed US$5 a gallon in the second week of March. Those are the numbers that made the financial news. The fertilizer shock did not yet. But food prices are a lagging indicator.

The disruption happens now in the supply chain. The price spike hits retail shelves in late summer and fall. By the time it's visible in CPI reports, the planting decisions that set it in motion are already 6 months in the past. You can't unplant a season. And here's the wild card inside the wild card. Europe entered this crisis structurally weakened in ways that make the comparison to 2022 almost meaningless.

Gas reserves at the beginning of 2026 set at 46 billion cubic meters. That compares to 60 billion the year before and 77 billion in 2024. Qatar Energy declaring force majeure on LNG contracts doesn't just hit spot prices. It hits the refill trajectory for storage that Europe was already struggling to rebuild after the 2022 shock. European gas prices surged more than 20% in weeks.

The continent that spent three years building resilience against Russian energy dependency has now walked directly into a Middle Eastern energy dependency crisis it had almost no preparation for. Here's the part that should make you genuinely uncomfortable.

There is a scenario, not a fringe scenario, a plausible and discussed scenario among energy security analysts where the Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed through summer 2026. The IEA has already called the current disruption the worst energy security crisis ever recorded.

That assessment was made with a partial closure and a partial price spike. A prolonged closure, through the northern hemisphere summer with European storage at multi-year lows, with the fertilizer shock landing in retail prices by August with Goldman's recession probability ,is already at 30%.

That is not a financial stress scenario. That is a cascading economic event with geopolitical consequences that the current diplomatic timeline is not equipped to handle.

Trump extended his “Deadline” for striking Iranian power plants by 10 days to April 6. Today. Iran's Foreign Minister told state media that indirect exchanges through mediators do not qualify as negotiations. Iran rejected the American ceasefire proposal and presented its own terms.

In the meantime, Trumps bosses running the GEOP continues to ignore the “Deadline” with cavalier abandon as they’re doing with the “Ceasefire” agreements in Gaza and Lebanon.

The Inflection Point

March 26 was the day of the 84th attack wave in 27 days executed by the revolutionary Islamic Republic of Iran. On that wave 84, the math tipped straight into an inflection point, and an Iranian ballistic missile found its target in Tel Aviv without resistance. In other words, the GEOP-American air defense simply failed to intercept a ballistic missile it had successfully intercepted before, and uncovered a new reality in the process.

The GEOP’s Occupation Forces admitted as much. They said the volume broke the system, meaning that their Iron Dome didn't fail because of a technical glitch. It didn't fail because the revolutionary Islamic Republic built something new. The most expensive air defense architecture ever constructed failed because they found  something cheaper than innovation. They found simple math.

That’s exactly what is buried inside a Bloomberg terminal report cross referenced with IEA emergency data and a Goldman Sachs probability model. The contents of that dataset and the probability model changes the entire framing of this war in terms of who's winning, who's bleeding, who's running out of runway -- and flips it completely.

Militarily Iran has also finalized a deal with Russia in December 2025, covering 500 Verba portable air defense launchers and 2500 missiles over 3 years. Iran requested the S400, Russia's most advanced air defense platform. Moscow declined, calculating that deploying Russian personnel directly into the conflict was a step too far. Everything short of that is moving, which means Iran is not running down its inventory.

Iran is resupplying, upgrading, and funding the resupply with oil revenue generated by the disruption created by its own military operations. The wild card is not Russia. It isn't the fertilizer shock. It isn't even the Hormuz closure. The wild card is the possibility that Iran has no incentive to negotiate from weakness. Because by every financial metric available right now, it isn't in a position of weakness. It is the only combatant in this war currently turning a profit, and it is the reason that every ceasefire-is-imminent headline needs to be read with a very specific kind of skepticism.

With the cost exchange ratios firmly and irreversibly in its favor, Iran is winning this war economically -- not militarily, not diplomatically, and not in the corporate media headlines. And it's winning because in this existential war of strategic attrition, death is preferable to humiliation to its heroic and noble people.

Sohel Nadeem Rahman is an Industrial Psychologist specializing in Neurocognitive Systems, Behavioral Finance, and Strategy. He is the Managing Partner of Asian Tiger Capital Holdings based in Dhaka.