Setting aside any considerations on our side: for this war (or really any war), it's worth turning the chessboard around to look at things from your adversary's perspective as much as possible.
If you're the Iranian regime, the world is a hostile place. You're surrounded by enemies and potential enemies. In your time of crisis, the friends you thought you had are acting like they don't know you. The situation is one of existential threat. A future reality with your head on a pike is a very real possibility. You don't exactly have many options here, so maybe you play the only move you can make. It's a risky one, but it's at least bold and will be effectuating.
Interestingly, this move also attacks your real enemy: the globalized market. Iran would do well for itself in a world of 1926; in 2026, there's going to be friction.
In a sense, they're not fighting the US/Israel. They're fighting our datacenters. I'm sure the strategy for this conflict was vibe-planned to a large extent. A hyper-conservative regime like this will probably fare (at least in the long run) about as well as you would if you decide to nope out of society and go live in a Hobbesian state of nature in your local park. That might work for awhile, but eventually, the system will come for you. And that's just neutrality. Pick a fight with capital, and you'll always lose.
Yes this is pretty much my read as well. You can debate the morality or pragmatism of this war (or any war) but fundamentally there is no winning against global Capital. The US, some other country, are just vectors for larger forces.
Which IMO is why attempting to combat that from the outside is probably fruitless, and a better route is to try and gain control from the inside. Iran (or Russia, for that matter) would be dominant forces if they were integrated with their neighbors. Imagine Russia inside the EU – they'd have as much/more influence than Germany.
But they're outside, increasingly isolated, and thus open to erosion, whether in a hostile war like today's, or just by being outcompeted and culturally left behind.
Some would say Russia is very much inside the US and somewhat inside the EU through its proxies (currently govts of Hungary and Slovakia, quite possibly in the future - France and Germany).
Iran is on “death ground” as Sarah Paine would say. It’s a TERRIBLE idea to put your enemy on death ground because all they can do is fight now. We’re going to keep bombing them until there’s nothing left. Iran is going to end up looking like Afghanistan (a broken country of small feudal states) at the end of this.
Edit: By Iran, I'm referring to what's left of the current Iranian administration and military, not the entirety of the Iranian people.
You’re overlooking the fundamental difference between Iranian society and Afghan society. In Afghanistan, the U.S. was trying to bomb a place that was always a collection of small feudal states into being a functioning country. In Iran, it’s trying to dislodge a theocracy that’s taken over a country that’s had orderly, centralized administration for almost two thousand years.
I wouldn’t bet on either approach working. But a good outcome in Afghanistan was always completely hopeless. A good outcome in Iran is merely unlikely.
No, this isn't what Paine means by death ground. Paine used that to refer to Soviet citizens/soldiers that knew they would be erased/eliminated if they lost. The Iranians don't think that their opponents want to eliminate their entire civilization.
> Iran is going to end up looking like Afghanistan (a broken country of small feudal states) at the end of this.
Soooo, lateral move from 1999 with the benefit of the theocratic regime that rules over those states having a bit of hindsight this time and being keenly aware that they ought not to let themselves be exploited puppet or proxy for larger international conflict? I'm not saying Afghanistan on track to be a shining beacon of modernity in an otherwise backwards region but things are looking pretty up for them and I wish them the best.
An equivalent for Iran would be what? Next guy shows up in charge, promises a few token reforms. Bombs stop falling, protestors go home, business as usual resumes but with a little more normalcy toward the rest of the world.
> A hyper-conservative regime like this will probably fare (at least in the long run) about as well as you would if you decide to nope out of society and go live in a Hobbesian state of nature in your local park.
Sounds more like the Taliban than Iran's ex-leadership.
Pete Hegseth is hyper-conservative too. Actually all three of the main combatants are hardline religious groups.
> Pete Hegseth is hyper-conservative too. Actually all three of the main combatants are hardline religious groups.
You get downvoted for saying something that's true, and it's not even a defense of the Irani theocratic dictatorship.
Namely: at least some of the support for the war (and for Israel) in the US is religiously motivated. Religious as in "fundamentalist". This doesn't make the US a theocracy, but it does mean many of the decision makers are making decisions based at least partly on Christian fundamentalist doctrine.
There are already some reports [1] of US troops complaining they are being told they've embarked on a mission from God. It boggles the mind.
> "One complainant, identified as a noncommissioned officer (NCO) in a unit that could be deployed “at any moment to join” operations against Iran, told MRFF in a complaint viewed by the Guardian that their commander had “urged us to tell our troops that this was ‘all part of God’s divine plan’ and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ”
> "“He said that ‘President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth’”, the NCO added."
Edit: wow, downvotes for quoting a mainstream newspaper with evidence that US policy is at least influenced by Christian fundamentalists, and this without any real argument to counter this, just drive-by downvoting? Sheesh, is this what passes for debate in HN?
They're fighting our datacenters. (...) A hyper-conservative regime like this will probably fare (at least in the long run) about as well as you would if you decide to nope out of society
You do know that Iran has technical universities, works on advanced weaponry, and the leader of their National Security council has a computer science degree?
It is important to at least look at things as they are, and not through the prism of orientalism.
Iran's regime is socially conservative. But so is the current US government. There is no sign that they are anti-technology or isolationist.
I agree, that's why they lasted as long as they did. It's a strategy that works, but only for awhile. They tried to use the apparatuses of global capital without fully integrating within it. That makes them an exteriority from the perspective of the market.
In the end, that (plus their essential resource flows) only make them a more viable candidate for expansion of capital's machinic assemblage. The force of the market hasn't colonized all of the Earth yet; it yet has many peripheries. There's plenty of room for expansion in, say, central Africa. It'll get there eventually, but right now its focus is elsewhere. The assemblage will always weigh the costs/benefits, then select the next best space to expand into. That's what it's doing here. The goal is to convert some of its surplus value into ingesting a bit of its frontier, and make of it its own.
Iran is firmly sided with China and Russia. China buys all their oil and doesn't want to see US/Israel expand their reach. They are very likely to support Iran.
On their end, Iran has been preparing for exactly this for decades. If anything, the complexity of the globalized market means more weak points to strike. Which in 2026 is cheap and easy with swarms of drones. Meanwhile, the US is still carrying out precision attacks with expensive ordnance which they have limited supplies of.
Russia has their hands full with Ukraine and has failed in the past to protect other allies such as Syria.
China seems wise enough to provide some support to Iran while sitting out of direct involvement in the war. China has everything to lose with war and nothing to gain. If anything, they are signaling "stability" to the Global South -- something from which the US is increasingly drifting away -- and war is the opposite of stability.
> Meanwhile, the US is still carrying out precision attacks with expensive ordnance which they have limited supplies of.
I think they have more than enough, plus Iran faces an even worse situation. Limited stockpiles of their only effective weapons, missiles and drones, and quickly running out. What's worse, by not using those weapons in huge salvoes, they reduce their efficiency... they only work if they can overcome defenses, but if they spend them too fast they lose their only effective weapon.
I think the Islamic Republic will be overthrown, but this requires boots on the ground, and it'll become a quagmire like Iraq or Afghanistan. At some point the US will declare success and leave, and from the ashes of Iran countless warring factions will emerge, an endless insurgency, and possibly the next ISIS. We've seen this happen more than once, no reason to believe this will go a different way.
Russia and China cannot stop this.
Edit: rather than downvotes, I prefer debate. Be better, HN. I realize this is difficult in times of war involving the country where the majority of HN hails from, but I trust you can do it. Engage in rational debate please.
> In a sense, they're not fighting the US/Israel. They're fighting our datacenters.
LOL. Sorry, this is silly. Do you really think that Iran hates data centers?
The best scenario for Trump is to make this a limited war that nobody even notices outside of Iran's borders. He wants to announce to Americans "see? We did what we wanted and it was over in a few days, you barely noticed it".
While the nightmare scenario is to end up bogged down in a long drawn war with global repercussions, inflation, market crashes or even boots on the ground for months and years.
Iran can't win a military confrontation with the US, but it can make it so expensive that the US will decide to back off. These are strategic attacks, their form of "second strike". Raising the price of an attack on them, exactly as a nuclear armed country would retaliate on cities and not on military bases.
It explains that one of Iran's goals is to make the GCC (UAE, Kuwait, etc) uninvestable by making them non-safe and choke the Strait of Hormuz. This affects the petrodollar as well as American stock market since the GCC invest much of that oil money back into American companies.
He also explains in this video why a ground invasion of Iran is damn near impossible due to the terrains and how Saudi Arabia and Iran are connected: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y_hbz6loEo
As someone who doesn't know much about the highly complex history, goals of the Middle East and the world, they're informative but I'm also open to people who disagree with this guy. Would love to hear things from all sides.
Warning: The Youtube channel has a very doomish view of this conflict though. He thinks this is the start of WW3.
I don't know about the guys take on Iran, but I came across his channel a long time ago regarding some predictions on things I work with + I think Ukraine war? And it was so handwavy and "cherry picking stats to fit a narrative" style of reasoning, it was hard to take him seriously when many predictions were proven wrong and not even sound.
Granted, most YouTube analyst channels with ~=>500k subscribers usually do deploy exaggerated claims or "one parameter to explain everything" narrative (Zeihan, Varoufakis, Mersheimer, William Spaniel) so you should take their infotainment with a grain of salt. Current trendy buzzword is "Realism" and "Game Theory" so those two term are mired with wish washy handwaving.
Usually, just like tech stuff, the actually valuable insight is not found in the blogs but the source material they refer to, because they have nuances.
I agree with you. I followed him out of curiosity for one or two months, watched about 10 of his videos.
He seems to have a good intuition, but he gives weak and often cherry-picked reasonings, to the point that many of his takes are completely unreliable.
For a channel called Predictive History, he made too many weirdly precise explanations and predictions that turned out to be wrong. Then, he'd look over the old failed ones to find new ones.
That being said, I'd say his macro level analysis is directionally correct, as well as his read on the incentives of each party involved. Watch his lectures, but be skeptical and double check everything he says, because he does indeed make factual mistakes... some of them are caught in the comments by other viewers, some are not obvious.
One of your "YouTube analysts" is a professor that developed one of the schools of realism, so maybe that's why he's using that "buzzword".
Edit: and varoufakis was the finance minister of Greece. I have no idea if he was any good at it or not, but your characterization is a little silly either way.
Would they be more credible to you if they gave 2 minute soundbites in between advertisements for drugs and gold on cable news?
This guy's videos were immediately going viral after the conflict began. I enjoyed and found them educational, but I'm taking all of his claims with a grain of salt because I also don't know much about the region or its history. He talks very authoritatively which makes for compelling storytelling but conflicts of this magnitude require much more context to really understand.
Been following this guy for a few months now. On Iran i think he is right on the money. He also has some very good lectures about personal development.
He might indeed need some personal development himself. I followed him when the US bombed Iran's nuclear sites last year. He was involved in a controversy with his kid and turned into a dick, going into a charade against the Western education system, for being overly harsh to his kid in a public space and getting reprimanded for it. I'm not condoning his behavior, I wasn't there, but I'd take anything this guy has to say on personal development with a pinch of salt. By the way, he published a post of apologies in his Substack IIRC.
Equally, were he based in the UK (or even the US during wartime, despite the First Amendment), he wouldn't be able to say things those governments don't approve of.
So yes to some extent it might be CCP propaganda, but that doesn't mean it's always wrong, and the alternative is western propaganda, which is also sometimes wrong
While I agree with some of his sentiments the entire video reeks of half-baked conspiratorial thinking and shallow engagement with the facts.
A quick tell is that the video's title includes "Game Theory", while only referencing game-theoretical concepts twice in an off-hand comment. In both instances the usage is plainly wrong.
In general, he loves making big assertions without backing them up with evidence or explanations that go beyond hand-wavy examples.
Game Theory is the name of his class. He is a high school teacher. I agree his ideas about the conflict are only loosely connected to "Game Theory" in the Academic sense. If you engage with more of his content, he often repeats that he is probably wrong and exhorts you to think for yourself and make your own conclusions. His perspective on past and current events is certainly not mainstream.
Cut off the EU's main energy supplier and make it dependent on the US.
Grab the largest oil reserves.
Start a special military operation with Iran, knowing that Iran will close the Strait of Hormuz, thus cutting off a large part of the world's oil and gas.
The US profits from this are going to be staggering.
The shipping disruption has a second-order impact that I haven't seen discussed much: fertilizer.
Five of the world's largest fertilizer exporters — Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, and Bahrain — rely almost entirely on Hormuz to ship their products. These aren't boutique exports. They supply a meaningful fraction of global nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium.
The chain: fertilizer prices spike → farmers plant less or reduce application → crop yields fall → grain prices rise → food-importing countries face hard choices.
This runs on a different clock than the oil shock. The oil price spike is visible today. The food impact plays out over months — the planting decisions being made right now (under price uncertainty, with fertilizer supply chains disrupted) will shape harvests in June-August. Egypt's president already declared a "state of near-emergency" on inflation.
Hormuz blocking energy exports makes headlines. Hormuz blocking fertilizer exports is quieter — but for import-dependent food economies, it's potentially more consequential over a 6-12 month horizon.
Shipping insurance up 400% makes everything worse. A $250K/tanker surcharge doesn't just affect oil ships — every container ship, bulk carrier, and LNG tanker operating in the region pays more, and those costs flow forward to consumers of whatever those ships carry.
This is what "move fast and break things" looks like when it is applied to foreign policy. It is called imperialism.
As Mark Carney said: "if the middle powers are not in the table, they are in the menu" meaning "if the weak don't unite and resist together we'll be eaten by the strong".
OTOH, does anyone remember the "shock and awe" in the first days of Iraq War? It was pretty much like this. Soon, the orange buffoon might have a "mission accomplished" [1] moment and revert the tendency in the midterms. And then the U.S. gets even more screwed in the long run.
The beautiful irony is that Carney initially went all in supporting this illegal war of aggression. It seems he tempered his language a bit since then. Perhaps his team realized how hypocritical he sounds after that whole speech on Greenland.
Have you watched a Trump "speech" in the past few years? It's all incoherent rambling; he's not a unifying figure and never will be so I don't think midterm chances will suddenly go up if he gets on stage and declares victory. The things he's doing domestically are quite unpopular (e.g. killing American citizens with an immigration agency) and there hasn't been real governance -- just illegal tariffs, corrupt pardons, meme coins, attacks on free speech, and a vengeful, politicized DOJ.
Unfortunately the people who vote for him don't watch the speeches either and literally do not care that he does stupid things and generally wrecks shit because lower business taxes and he isn't a (D)
The conservative business class, since literally before Marx wrote anything, will do whatever it takes to never ever ever ever accept even a tiny reduction in their handouts. They will burn America down and destroy their own revenue before they let us collect an extra dollar in tax revenue for the betterment of society.
This war has been planned for decades. I was a boy in 2003, but I distinctly remember the threats against Iran during that time period. Time Magazine ran it on their cover...
One under-discussed coupling here is war-risk insurance.
Even if you assume you can physically route around the Red Sea or queue for escorted transits, the cost/availability of coverage can dominate the actual freight rate. A $/bbl/day premium that looks small at baseline becomes enormous once you multiply it by (a) crisis multipliers and (b) the holding time you incur from delays/port congestion. That creates a nonlinear feedback: higher perceived risk -> higher premium -> fewer sailings -> more delay -> higher premium.
I built a small terminal simulator to explore those dynamics (physical cargo + futures + insurance + random events + ceasefire crash): https://rentry.co/5ske8k8z
Japan and korean has it's oil imports from havoc at a 70-90% percent i think? very interesting to see how will this go.
very smart move for Iran to attach USA millity base at UAE...
Readit News
If you're the Iranian regime, the world is a hostile place. You're surrounded by enemies and potential enemies. In your time of crisis, the friends you thought you had are acting like they don't know you. The situation is one of existential threat. A future reality with your head on a pike is a very real possibility. You don't exactly have many options here, so maybe you play the only move you can make. It's a risky one, but it's at least bold and will be effectuating.
Interestingly, this move also attacks your real enemy: the globalized market. Iran would do well for itself in a world of 1926; in 2026, there's going to be friction.
In a sense, they're not fighting the US/Israel. They're fighting our datacenters. I'm sure the strategy for this conflict was vibe-planned to a large extent. A hyper-conservative regime like this will probably fare (at least in the long run) about as well as you would if you decide to nope out of society and go live in a Hobbesian state of nature in your local park. That might work for awhile, but eventually, the system will come for you. And that's just neutrality. Pick a fight with capital, and you'll always lose.
Which IMO is why attempting to combat that from the outside is probably fruitless, and a better route is to try and gain control from the inside. Iran (or Russia, for that matter) would be dominant forces if they were integrated with their neighbors. Imagine Russia inside the EU – they'd have as much/more influence than Germany.
But they're outside, increasingly isolated, and thus open to erosion, whether in a hostile war like today's, or just by being outcompeted and culturally left behind.
Edit: By Iran, I'm referring to what's left of the current Iranian administration and military, not the entirety of the Iranian people.
I wouldn’t bet on either approach working. But a good outcome in Afghanistan was always completely hopeless. A good outcome in Iran is merely unlikely.
Soooo, lateral move from 1999 with the benefit of the theocratic regime that rules over those states having a bit of hindsight this time and being keenly aware that they ought not to let themselves be exploited puppet or proxy for larger international conflict? I'm not saying Afghanistan on track to be a shining beacon of modernity in an otherwise backwards region but things are looking pretty up for them and I wish them the best.
An equivalent for Iran would be what? Next guy shows up in charge, promises a few token reforms. Bombs stop falling, protestors go home, business as usual resumes but with a little more normalcy toward the rest of the world.
Sounds more like the Taliban than Iran's ex-leadership.
Pete Hegseth is hyper-conservative too. Actually all three of the main combatants are hardline religious groups.
You get downvoted for saying something that's true, and it's not even a defense of the Irani theocratic dictatorship.
Namely: at least some of the support for the war (and for Israel) in the US is religiously motivated. Religious as in "fundamentalist". This doesn't make the US a theocracy, but it does mean many of the decision makers are making decisions based at least partly on Christian fundamentalist doctrine.
There are already some reports [1] of US troops complaining they are being told they've embarked on a mission from God. It boggles the mind.
> "One complainant, identified as a noncommissioned officer (NCO) in a unit that could be deployed “at any moment to join” operations against Iran, told MRFF in a complaint viewed by the Guardian that their commander had “urged us to tell our troops that this was ‘all part of God’s divine plan’ and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ”
> "“He said that ‘President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth’”, the NCO added."
(This was just one report of many).
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/03/us-israel-iran...
Edit: wow, downvotes for quoting a mainstream newspaper with evidence that US policy is at least influenced by Christian fundamentalists, and this without any real argument to counter this, just drive-by downvoting? Sheesh, is this what passes for debate in HN?
It is important to at least look at things as they are, and not through the prism of orientalism.
Iran's regime is socially conservative. But so is the current US government. There is no sign that they are anti-technology or isolationist.
In the end, that (plus their essential resource flows) only make them a more viable candidate for expansion of capital's machinic assemblage. The force of the market hasn't colonized all of the Earth yet; it yet has many peripheries. There's plenty of room for expansion in, say, central Africa. It'll get there eventually, but right now its focus is elsewhere. The assemblage will always weigh the costs/benefits, then select the next best space to expand into. That's what it's doing here. The goal is to convert some of its surplus value into ingesting a bit of its frontier, and make of it its own.
The explanation is here: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Seyed-Hosseini-23/publi...
Population grew from 1950 at 20+million to today 80+million; every country quadrupling the population would collapse?
Deleted Comment
On their end, Iran has been preparing for exactly this for decades. If anything, the complexity of the globalized market means more weak points to strike. Which in 2026 is cheap and easy with swarms of drones. Meanwhile, the US is still carrying out precision attacks with expensive ordnance which they have limited supplies of.
TL;DR: Capital might very well lose this one.
Given the 12 day war and now, it doesn't seem like they are putting much of a fight. The US air superiority has completely done them, it'd seem.
> Iran is firmly sided with China and Russia.
Doesn't seem like those two will move an inch.
Russia has their hands full with Ukraine and has failed in the past to protect other allies such as Syria.
China seems wise enough to provide some support to Iran while sitting out of direct involvement in the war. China has everything to lose with war and nothing to gain. If anything, they are signaling "stability" to the Global South -- something from which the US is increasingly drifting away -- and war is the opposite of stability.
> Meanwhile, the US is still carrying out precision attacks with expensive ordnance which they have limited supplies of.
I think they have more than enough, plus Iran faces an even worse situation. Limited stockpiles of their only effective weapons, missiles and drones, and quickly running out. What's worse, by not using those weapons in huge salvoes, they reduce their efficiency... they only work if they can overcome defenses, but if they spend them too fast they lose their only effective weapon.
I think the Islamic Republic will be overthrown, but this requires boots on the ground, and it'll become a quagmire like Iraq or Afghanistan. At some point the US will declare success and leave, and from the ashes of Iran countless warring factions will emerge, an endless insurgency, and possibly the next ISIS. We've seen this happen more than once, no reason to believe this will go a different way.
Russia and China cannot stop this.
Edit: rather than downvotes, I prefer debate. Be better, HN. I realize this is difficult in times of war involving the country where the majority of HN hails from, but I trust you can do it. Engage in rational debate please.
LOL. Sorry, this is silly. Do you really think that Iran hates data centers?
The best scenario for Trump is to make this a limited war that nobody even notices outside of Iran's borders. He wants to announce to Americans "see? We did what we wanted and it was over in a few days, you barely noticed it".
While the nightmare scenario is to end up bogged down in a long drawn war with global repercussions, inflation, market crashes or even boots on the ground for months and years.
Iran can't win a military confrontation with the US, but it can make it so expensive that the US will decide to back off. These are strategic attacks, their form of "second strike". Raising the price of an attack on them, exactly as a nuclear armed country would retaliate on cities and not on military bases.
Dead Comment
It explains that one of Iran's goals is to make the GCC (UAE, Kuwait, etc) uninvestable by making them non-safe and choke the Strait of Hormuz. This affects the petrodollar as well as American stock market since the GCC invest much of that oil money back into American companies.
His other videos on Iran, Israel, and America through the lens of game theory are also quite good. It's a side you often you don't hear in mainstream media: https://www.youtube.com/@PredictiveHistory/search?query=iran
He also explains in this video why a ground invasion of Iran is damn near impossible due to the terrains and how Saudi Arabia and Iran are connected: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y_hbz6loEo
As someone who doesn't know much about the highly complex history, goals of the Middle East and the world, they're informative but I'm also open to people who disagree with this guy. Would love to hear things from all sides.
Warning: The Youtube channel has a very doomish view of this conflict though. He thinks this is the start of WW3.
Granted, most YouTube analyst channels with ~=>500k subscribers usually do deploy exaggerated claims or "one parameter to explain everything" narrative (Zeihan, Varoufakis, Mersheimer, William Spaniel) so you should take their infotainment with a grain of salt. Current trendy buzzword is "Realism" and "Game Theory" so those two term are mired with wish washy handwaving.
Usually, just like tech stuff, the actually valuable insight is not found in the blogs but the source material they refer to, because they have nuances.
He seems to have a good intuition, but he gives weak and often cherry-picked reasonings, to the point that many of his takes are completely unreliable.
For a channel called Predictive History, he made too many weirdly precise explanations and predictions that turned out to be wrong. Then, he'd look over the old failed ones to find new ones.
That being said, I'd say his macro level analysis is directionally correct, as well as his read on the incentives of each party involved. Watch his lectures, but be skeptical and double check everything he says, because he does indeed make factual mistakes... some of them are caught in the comments by other viewers, some are not obvious.
One of your "YouTube analysts" is a professor that developed one of the schools of realism, so maybe that's why he's using that "buzzword".
Edit: and varoufakis was the finance minister of Greece. I have no idea if he was any good at it or not, but your characterization is a little silly either way.
Would they be more credible to you if they gave 2 minute soundbites in between advertisements for drugs and gold on cable news?
https://youtu.be/4Ql24Z8SIeE?si=csY0Jl19VYXNouk2&t=860
That matters. China would not allow him to broadcast things they do not approve of.
So yes to some extent it might be CCP propaganda, but that doesn't mean it's always wrong, and the alternative is western propaganda, which is also sometimes wrong
A quick tell is that the video's title includes "Game Theory", while only referencing game-theoretical concepts twice in an off-hand comment. In both instances the usage is plainly wrong.
In general, he loves making big assertions without backing them up with evidence or explanations that go beyond hand-wavy examples.
Cut off the EU's main energy supplier and make it dependent on the US.
Grab the largest oil reserves.
Start a special military operation with Iran, knowing that Iran will close the Strait of Hormuz, thus cutting off a large part of the world's oil and gas.
The US profits from this are going to be staggering.
Five of the world's largest fertilizer exporters — Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, and Bahrain — rely almost entirely on Hormuz to ship their products. These aren't boutique exports. They supply a meaningful fraction of global nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium.
The chain: fertilizer prices spike → farmers plant less or reduce application → crop yields fall → grain prices rise → food-importing countries face hard choices.
This runs on a different clock than the oil shock. The oil price spike is visible today. The food impact plays out over months — the planting decisions being made right now (under price uncertainty, with fertilizer supply chains disrupted) will shape harvests in June-August. Egypt's president already declared a "state of near-emergency" on inflation.
Hormuz blocking energy exports makes headlines. Hormuz blocking fertilizer exports is quieter — but for import-dependent food economies, it's potentially more consequential over a 6-12 month horizon.
Shipping insurance up 400% makes everything worse. A $250K/tanker surcharge doesn't just affect oil ships — every container ship, bulk carrier, and LNG tanker operating in the region pays more, and those costs flow forward to consumers of whatever those ships carry.
As Mark Carney said: "if the middle powers are not in the table, they are in the menu" meaning "if the weak don't unite and resist together we'll be eaten by the strong".
OTOH, does anyone remember the "shock and awe" in the first days of Iraq War? It was pretty much like this. Soon, the orange buffoon might have a "mission accomplished" [1] moment and revert the tendency in the midterms. And then the U.S. gets even more screwed in the long run.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_Accomplished_speech
https://x.com/markjcarney/status/2027721462233141679?s=46
Here is the partial walk back: https://x.com/harry__faulkner/status/2028950225683894395?s=4...
being hypocritical would be not helping Spain out whos taking the sign down.
within canada though, there is a gigantic iranian diaspora and getting rid of the islamic regime brings out a ton of protesters in support.
The conservative business class, since literally before Marx wrote anything, will do whatever it takes to never ever ever ever accept even a tiny reduction in their handouts. They will burn America down and destroy their own revenue before they let us collect an extra dollar in tax revenue for the betterment of society.
https://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,20060925,00.htm...
Europe largely shifted to a mix of US and Norway following the Russian-Ukraine War in 2022.
Specifically, India and France know this for decades.
Even if you assume you can physically route around the Red Sea or queue for escorted transits, the cost/availability of coverage can dominate the actual freight rate. A $/bbl/day premium that looks small at baseline becomes enormous once you multiply it by (a) crisis multipliers and (b) the holding time you incur from delays/port congestion. That creates a nonlinear feedback: higher perceived risk -> higher premium -> fewer sailings -> more delay -> higher premium.
I built a small terminal simulator to explore those dynamics (physical cargo + futures + insurance + random events + ceasefire crash): https://rentry.co/5ske8k8z
From one evil war monger to the next.