Juan Cole
Informed Comment / August 23, 2026
Ann Arbor – The Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Mohsen Rezaei, replied on Saturday to Trump’s threats to impose “economic warfare and isolation on an unprecedented scale,” on Iran, as other military figures said Iran is moving from a defensive to an offensive military doctrine. The US president said, “Any country that allows its financial institutions, businesses, airports, or government entities to provide any type of lifeline to Iran will itself face tremendous economic consequences.” He called an economic “D-Day” and demanded that all of America’s allies join in the effort to crush the Iranian civilian economy. Arguably, this course of action is a war crime, since International Humanitarian Law forbids the targeting of civilian objects, and the functioning of the economy is largely non-military.
Rezaei responded by threatening Iran’s Gulf Arab neighbours. The United Arab Emirates has already joined the American campaign, announcing that it was cutting off economic relations with Iran. Since Dubai is suspected of having laundered billions of dollars for Tehran over the years, the announcement came as a shock. Rezaei is apparently threatening to target countries, such as the UAE, that fall into line behind Trump in his “D-Day” assault on Iran’s economy.
Rezaei warned Iran’s neighbours “not to participate” in Trump’s economic warfare against Iran. Otherwise, he said, “We will consider you an enemy. We do not seek to widen the war, but if Iran’s neighbours take part in America’s economic war on Iran, we will strike at their interests.” He added that in that case, “not a single drop of oil will go out of the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz.”
Rezaei’s threats underline a flaw in Trump’s economic warfare on Iran, which is that Tehran is capable of disrupting world energy markets and the world economy if it feels sufficiently under threat. Trump will be in a world of pain politically if Iran carries out this threat. As I said yesterday, Iran has taken global energy hostage to defend itself from Trump’s threats, and it isn’t afraid to start executing the hostages. Iran has already shown it is willing to take out Liquefied Natural Gas capacity in Qatar and oil facilities in Kuwait, and even water desalinization plants, without which the Arab Gulf would be depopulated and any oil or gas exports would be brought to a grinding halt.
Brig. Gen. Mohammad Akraminia, the spokesman for the Iranian army, observed Saturday that while Iran had for a long time hewed to a defensive military doctrine, Tehran had shifted to an offensive stance after having been repeatedly attacked. He explained that by an “offensive” doctrine he was not necessarily referring to pre-emptive attacks, though Iran has deployed this tactic, as in a recent strike on a covert US base in Jordan.
He said, “Our country’s military doctrine in the past was defensive, but gradually during these two wars, we saw that the country’s military doctrine has been moving from defensive to taking the offense.”
He emphasized: “The offensive military doctrine does not necessarily mean pre-emptive operations.” But, he said, “in the attack on the US base in Jordan, we showed a pre-emptive approach,” targeting the enemy prior to its attack on Iran, “and there, serious damage was done to the equipment, abilities and manpower forces of the Americans.”
Akraminia added that pre-emption “is one dimension of the concept of offensive military doctrine, but it has other dimensions, including that any act of aggression will be answered immediately, and the riposte may be more extensive than the act of aggression.” He thus seemed to be saying that Tehran now questions the principle of International Humanitarian Law that counter-attacks must be proportionate to the original strike.
Iran, moreover, still has the wherewithal to implement its offensive military doctrine.
BBC Monitoring notes that according to “Vision of the Islamic Republic Channel 2,” Armed Forces Chief of Staff Maj. Gen. Ali Abdollahi announced that Iran since 28 February 2026 has tripled its production of unmanned aerial vehicles that can hover over targets or “loiter” until they are ordered to attack. They are sometimes called “suicide” or “kamikaze” drones. Gen. Abdollahi also underlined the ability of the Shahed 136 drone to evade radar detection.
Before the Israeli-US attack on Iran, it was thought to have 80,000 drones of all sorts. Iran is said to be able to construct 400 drones a day. In the 176 days since Trump launched his war of aggression, Iran could have constructed over 70,000 drones of various sorts, including kamikaze drones. The Israeli and US governments boasted of striking Iranian drone and missile storage and production sites thousands of times, but it appears that most of those supposed targets were false flag decoys and all the two countries managed to do was use up a lot of their expensive ammunition. Since they missed so often, they were vulnerable to ripostes by Iranian drones and missiles, and had to deplete their stock of interceptors.
Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment; he is Richard P. Mitchell Distinguished University Professor in the History Department at the University of Michigan
