A man is old if he tells you that he has visited Tehran when the flamboyant Shah was ruling there. This writer belongs to that generation of oldies. I first lived in the Middle East in 1973, during the Yom Kippur War.
The Arab press told us that Egypt, ruled by Anwar Sadat, had won. A few days later, there were some roundabout, sheepish statements about reverses caused by American intervention. No one openly admitted that the Egyptian armies had been surrounded. Israel looked strong until US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger forced it to refrain from completing the Egyptian rout. This reversal happened in hours.
Over the years, my personal and professional associations with this region have continued, and one conclusion I have come to is that early claims of victory never last. It may take hours, days, weeks, months or sometimes even years, but, as night follows day, every claim gets reversed.
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A tale of turnarounds—Syria to Israel and Iran
Let us take a look at more recent times. The Syrian civil war began in 2011, and the US under President Barack Obama soon became involved, backing anti-government rebels.
Initially it looked as if Syrian President Bashar al-Assad would fall in the Syrian version of the Arab Spring. But that did not happen. In fact, at the end of ten years, the civil war was spluttering out and Assad was firmly in power. The Gulf states, which represent an accurate regional weathervane, then started cozying up to Assad, the inevitable victor. The old claims had been reversed. It just took many years.
And then, all of a sudden in 2024, Assad fell as the al-Qaeda offshoot Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) took over Aleppo and then Damascus in a matter of a few days. Assad fled to colder climes. The newer old claims had now been reversed again.
October 7 exposed Israeli intelligence and even its military as disgraceful incompetents. Israel was now under attack not just from Hamas to the west, but from Hezbollah in the north and the Houthis to the south. Israel seemed in mortal danger. And then things reversed again.
Israel took hard action against Hamas in Gaza and Hamas leaders were being killed in quick succession. Then came the “pager attack” against Hezbollah. It looked as if Hezbollah’s goose had been cooked, especially as Israeli intelligence had penetrated Hezbollah and Israel could kill assembled Hezbollah leaders with ease. Israel took the battle to Iran’s embassy in Damascus and to the heart of Tehran, killing a visiting Hamas leader, exposing the fact that the Iranian establishment had been hopelessly compromised by Israeli intelligence. The situation had reversed quite dramatically.
Israeli dominance reached its pinnacle in the middle of 2025. Israeli planes penetrated the air defences of Iran and established an air corridor directly over Tehran. The US entry with bunker-buster bombs against Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment facility sealed the situation. Iran was weakened. To make matters worse, the US Treasury’s efforts, as its Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent boasted, caused a currency crisis in Iran. This time the demonstrations on the streets of Iran were not just filled with the usual feminist protesters. Droves of merchants turned up and railed against the government. It now looked as if the Iranian government was facing a terminal crisis.
But tarry a minute. This is the Middle East. A fresh reversal was inevitable and it came partly because the US and Israel overplayed their hands. When former CIA head Mike Pompeo alluded to Mossad agents walking beside Iranian demonstrators, and later told an Israeli television channel that Washington had “directly helped” the rioters, he gave the plot away.
Again, things reversed. The Iranian government re-established order and its firm grip on the country soon. The Western gamble, which started off as a success, was now shown to be weak.
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Reversals redux?
And then came the February 28 war. On day one, the US and Israel were riding high. Many Iranian leaders, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, were dead, again demonstrating intelligence dominance. So, the Iranian government was now about to implode and a new set of leaders was going to step in. Syria would be repeated in Iran. No such luck for the West. This time the reversal happened very soon. The Iranian government did not crumble. Even killing more leaders did not help. A decentralised functioning state emerged and before long a new hidden Supreme Leader was in place.
The war over the next few weeks created a new reversal. A weak and terrified Iran, which was earlier willing to make concessions far beyond the 2015 JCPOA, was now getting into something that resembled the driver’s seat.
Iran had discovered a new weapon in the Hormuz Strait, a weapon far more potent than a mere atomic bomb. Iran, which had lived for years fearing American bombs, was now instilling fear of Iranian bombs in the states across the Gulf and, for that matter, even as far away as Israel. And Hezbollah, which had reportedly been decimated by exploding pagers and intelligence infiltration, rose up again like a phoenix. Israel’s northern frontier was no longer secure. The long-forgotten Houthis started making dramatic gains on the ground in Yemen and kept reminding everyone that they had great nuisance value in the Red Sea. This new reversal clearly shows Iran on a high.
But this being the Middle East, another reversal cannot be ruled out. As the US, Venezuela, Guyana, Brazil, Russia and Azerbaijan ramp up oil production, Iran’s Hormuz weapon may decline in importance. As Saudi Arabia, the UAE and even Iraq expand routes that bypass Hormuz, once more Iran’s weapon becomes weaker. This may take months or years. But a reversal looks to be on the cards. Even the ceasefire now looks fragile, with Donald Trump saying the deal is “over” after fresh strikes from both sides this week.
What is most interesting is that, with the glut of electric vehicles and solar panels the world faces thanks to China, total demand for oil may decline and dramatically alter the importance of the petroleum reserves of the Gulf and with that the power of Iran’s Hormuz weapon. This demand change may need not years but months given the frenetic speed of Chinese manufacturing.
Iran is now basking in a victory, or at least in a non-defeat. But this is the Middle East. Stay tuned for a reversal.
Jaithirth ‘Jerry’ Rao is a retired entrepreneur who lives in Lonavala. He has published three books: ‘Notes from an Indian Conservative’, ‘The Indian Conservative’, and ‘Economist Gandhi’. Views are personal.
(Edited by Asavari Singh)