This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

It turns out that Iran did have a nuclear option after all, although it has nothing to do with enriched uranium or nuclear weapons. Instead, the Iranian weapon of mass destruction is its devastatingly effective strategy of closing the Strait of Hormuz and attacking the crucial – but fragile – energy infrastructure of the Gulf oil states.

Donald Trump has paused his threatened destruction of Iranian power plants for 10 days until 6 April, claiming that detailed and productive negotiations with Iran are under way. This is categorically denied by Tehran, and the price of Brent crude oil rose to $110 a barrel on Friday morning in a sign that the markets do not believe Trump’s assertion about US-Iran talks and suspect that Iran has the upper hand in the conflict so far.

Trump must now decide his next move in this deadly game of double or quits. It may lead him to escalate attacks on Iran’s civilian infrastructure, and land US troops on the Iranian side of the Gulf to seize their chief oil export terminal at Kharg Island and try to reopen the Strait of Hormuz for international shipping.

Iran’s strategy has proved so successful that a month into the war, it is in a stronger political position than before the US-Israeli attack on 28 February, having proved that it has the power to cripple the world economy. Israel has achieved operational successes – such as killing the head of the Iranian navy this week – but these assassinations stubbornly refuse to deliver decisive victory.

Trump keeps announcing that he has already won and Iranian leaders are “begging for a deal”, and bizarrely claiming that they allowed 10 tankers to exit the Strait of Hormuz as a sign of goodwill towards him. “We’re crushing their missiles and drone stockpiles,” he said, “destroying their defence industrial base. We’ve wiped out their navy completely. Their air force completely.”

Yet this list of supposed US and Israeli successes shows that Trump and his inner coterie have failed to understand a critical change in the nature of warfare. Until about 20 years ago, the US had a near monopoly on high precision munitions used in air strikes. This was on display in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen. But the monopoly did not last. Iran swiftly developed as a drone superpower, dramatically demonstrating its capability in a surprise attack on Saudi oil facilities at Abqaiq and Khrais in September 2019 which briefly cut the Kingdom’s oil output in half.

Everything that Iran has done militarily in the Gulf in the last four weeks is a mirror image of what happened then. Probably, the Pentagon had a well-informed premonition of this in the weeks before the war when it was vigorously leaking to the US media its professional caution about a war with Iran, reservations which were ignored by the White House.

Paradoxically, for all its inability to defend itself against US-Israeli airstrikes, Iran’s power as a geopolitical player has risen significantly in four weeks of war. Before the conflict, Iran controlled a mere 4 to 5 per cent of the world’s crude oil exports; its own output, in other words. Today, by blockading the Strait of Hormuz, it controls 20 per cent of world oil and liquefied natural gas exports. Hedge fund managers in New York, insurance brokers in Lloyds of London and motorised rickshaw drivers in Dacca in Bangladesh, find their lives all........

© iNews