India, March 12 -- The 2026 attack on Iran is the latest in the series of "oil-bomb" wars. It fits into an American doctrine: Nations that have oil cannot make a nuclear bomb or a weapon of mass destruction (WMD). A similar analogy applies to "oil-dollar wedlock": Nations that own oil cannot divorce the dollar. Most wars over the last few decades have been shaped by these principles. The third slant, discernibly, is radicalism that the US has been faced with for decades. Iran has been on the US's negative list on many of these counts.

The global economy runs on oil, and for five decades, this has overwhelmingly been run on the US dollar. This arrangement is known as the petrodollar system, i.e., pricing of oil exclusively in dollars in e...