Part 2 Anti-Anti-Nazi Barbarian Hordes are Knocking Down ...

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HORMUZ MINEFIELD: Iran’s Hidden Mines Trap 80+ Oil Tankers
Capital Breakdown
Mar 18, 2026 #hormuzcrisis #irannavy #oiltankers

Iran didn’t just threaten the Strait of Hormuz — it turned it into a weapon.

This is no ordinary disruption. Hidden naval mines have transformed the world’s most critical oil corridor into a live minefield, trapping over 80 oil tankers in a zone where movement itself has become a calculated risk.

Because in modern warfare, mines don’t chase targets — they control space.

Unlike missiles or drones, naval mines create something far more dangerous: uncertainty. One confirmed mine is enough to halt entire shipping lanes, forcing global trade into paralysis without a single shot being fired.

And that’s exactly what’s happening.

The Strait of Hormuz carries nearly 20% of the world’s oil supply. Now, with Iran deploying hidden mines, backed by naval patrols and selective passage control, this narrow waterway has become a geopolitical pressure point affecting energy markets worldwide.

Some ships are allowed through.
Others are left waiting.
And every decision is no longer commercial — it’s strategic.

Clearing these mines is slow, risky, and far from guaranteed. Every attempt to reopen the corridor exposes ships to further threats, escalating the situation beyond a simple blockade.

This isn’t just about trapped tankers.

This is about how a single choke point can reshape global power, disrupt economies, and redefine modern naval warfare.

If you want deeper military analysis that goes beyond headlines, make sure to Like, Subscribe, and stay ahead of the story.



Transcript

On the morning of February th,
the people of Tehran woke up to a sound they had never heard before in their lifetimes. Not a distant rumble, not the sound of a passing thunderstorm. It was
the unmistakable, gut-wrenching roar of precision air strikes hitting the heart of their capital city. And within hours,
the name of one man was on the lips of every geopolitical analyst, every intelligence officer, and every head of state on the planet. Not not Benjamin
Netanyahu. The name was Muhammad bin Salman. Because here is the truth that nobody in mainstream media is talking about. The war that you are watching unfold between the United States,
Israel, and Iran did not begin on February th, It began years earlier in the marble floored palaces of Riyad, in the private jets crossing
between Washington and Saudi Arabia, and in the quiet back channel phone calls between a crowned prince who wanted Iran destroyed and the most powerful leaders
in the Western world. By the end of this video, you're going to understand exactly how Muhammad bin Salman engineered the most audacious
geopolitical trap in modern history. How he used American military power, Israeli ambition, and Iranian miscalculation to do what Saudi Arabia could never have
done alone. Neutralize its greatest regional rival without firing a single Saudi missile. And the truly terrifying part, it worked. But the cost of that
success may reshape the entire global economy for a generation. Stick with me because what I'm about to show you goes far deeper than anything you have seen
in the news. And right at the end, I'm going to reveal the one factor that every analyst is getting wrong about where this goes next. And it involves
something in the straight of Hormuz that could change the price of everything you buy starting tomorrow. Let us go back to the beginning, not February the
real beginning. For decades, Saudi Arabia and Iran have been locked in one of the most consequential rivalries in world history. This is not simply a
religious conflict between Sunni and Shia Islam, though that dimension is real and significant. At its core, this is a battle for regional supremacy, a
struggle over who controls the political, economic, and military destiny of the Middle East. And for most of that history, Iran held significant advantages. Iran has a population of
roughly million people, more than double that of Saudi Arabia. It has a battleh hardened military forged through the Iran Iraq war, through decades of
proxy conflicts, and through the direct experience of asymmetric warfare that few nations in the world can match. Most importantly, Iran built something that
Saudi Arabia could never replicate with oil money alone. A vast network of proxy forces stretching from the Houthi rebels in Yemen to Hezbollah in Lebanon to the
popular mobilization forces in Iraq to Hamas in Gaza. This was Iran's great strategic achievement, the axis of resistance. a ring of armed, motivated,
battle tested groups that served as Iran's forward deterrent, projecting power and fear far beyond its own borders. Saudi Arabia looked at this network and understood something
fundamental. You cannot outspend your way out of a missile pointed at your oil fields. And in September Iran proved that point with terrifying
precision when drones and cruise missiles struck the Abk oil processing facility in eastern Saudi Arabia,
knocking out approximately % of the kingdom's oil production in a single night. Saudi air defenses armed with some of the most expensive American
equipment money could buy failed to stop it. That night changed everything for Muhammad bin Salman. Here is what most people misunderstand about NBS. The
Western media has painted him as a reckless, impulsive leader, a man who orders assassinations and starts wars on a whim. But that portrait is dangerously
incomplete. NBS is above all else a strategic calculator. His entire domestic reform agenda, vision the
opening of Saudi society, the massive investment in sports and entertainment and tourism, all of it is driven by one cold, rational calculation. Saudi Arabia
needs to transform itself before the oil money runs out. And it cannot transform itself if it is constantly under the shadow of Iranian missiles. Every entertainment venue he builds in Riyad,
every Formula race he hosts, every tech company he tries to attract to Saudi soil, all of it becomes worthless if Iran can shut off his desalination
plants with a drone swarm. The uppike attack was not just a military humiliation. It was an economic warning and NBS heard it loud and clear. So
beginning in and accelerating through and NBS began to execute a strategy of extraordinary
complexity. On the surface, he was presenting himself as a pragmatist, a leader willing to make peace. In March
in a diplomatic development that shocked the world, Saudi Arabia and Iran signed a normalization agreement brokered by China, reopening embassies
and pledging to reduce tensions. The Western press celebrated it as a sign of MBS maturing as a statesman. And on one
level, it was. But here is what those celebratory editorials missed. MBS was not making peace with Iran because he
trusted Iran. He was buying time. He was reducing the immediate threat to his economic transformation project while simultaneously working a completely
different angle. Cultivating the United States and Israel as the instruments of a final reckoning with Thran that he himself could never publicly advocate
for without destroying Saudi Arabia's standing in the Arab and Muslim world.
And to understand why MBS believed this moment was achievable, why he thought and represented the optimal
window for this operation, you need to understand what had happened to Iran's strategic position in the two years before the war. Between and
Israel had systematically dismantled the most capable components of Iran's axis of resistance. Hamas and Gaza had been degraded as a military force. Hezbollah
and Lebanon had lost several of its most senior military commanders, including Hassan Nasallah himself in a series of devastating Israeli strikes. The
-day war between Israel and Iran had already struck Iran's nuclear facilities once, setting the program back significantly. Assad's regime in Syria,
a critical node in the Iranian proxy network, had fallen to rebel forces. On inside Iran, the economic situation was dire. Inflation was crushing the middle
class. Protests were spreading. The regime's legitimacy was at its lowest point in years. NBS looked at this landscape and saw something that few
analysts articulated clearly at the time. Iran had never been weaker since the early years of the Islamic Republic.
And the United States under Trump had never been more willing to use military force. The window was open. And NBS intended to make sure it did not close
before someone walked through it. To understand how this worked, you need to understand the financial architecture that NBS constructed around the Trump administration. This is not speculation.
This is documented, reported, and verifiable. The Saudi public investment fund, the sovereign wealth fund that NBS personally chairs, made a $billion
investment in Affinity Partners, the private equity firm founded by Jared Kushner, Donald Trump's son-in-law. The PIF's own internal review committee had
recommended rejecting Kushner's proposal, citing his inexperience and what they described as excessive fees.
NBS overruled them personally. Why would the most powerful man in Saudi Arabia override his own financial analysts to give $billion to a firm that his own
experts said was not worth it? The answer has nothing to do with expected financial returns. It has everything to do with political access. Kushner is not
just a businessman. He is a direct line to Donald Trump. And through Kushner,
NBS purchased something far more valuable than any return on investment.
He purchased influence over the foreign policy decision-making of the United States of America. The numbers are staggering when you look at them clearly. The Senate Finance Committee
estimated that Kushner's firm would collect approximately $million in management fees from the Saudi investment alone by August
Meanwhile, the UAE, Saudi Arabia's close Gulf partner and fellow Iran hawk,
invested an additional $million with Affinity Partners. And separately, the UAE's national security adviser purchased nearly half of the Trump
linked crypto firm, World Liberty Financial, just days before Trump's inauguration, with approximately
million from that transaction flowing directly to Trump family entities. When you map out these financial relationships, a picture emerges that is
almost too audacious to believe. The two Gulf states most threatened by Iran had through perfectly legal financial investments created a web of economic
interest that bound the Trump family's financial future to the foreign policy objectives of Riad and Abu Dhabi. And then the phone calls began. According to
multiple reports from the Washington Post and other major outlets in the weeks and months leading up to February th, NBS was on the phone with
Trump and with senior administration officials making the case for military action against Iran. His argument was straightforward. Iran was on the verge
of a nuclear weapon. Its missile arsenal was growing. Its proxy network, though weakened by Israeli strikes in and was rebuilding. The window to act
was closing. And NBS had specific intelligence shared through Saudi channels about the state of Iran's nuclear and missile programs. Was this
intelligence accurate? Was it shaped and presented in a way designed to maximize its impact on a Trump administration already predisposed to hawkishness
toward Iran? Those are questions that historians will debate for decades. What we know is that it worked. But here is where the strategy becomes truly
masterful and truly ruthless. Even as NBS was privately lobbying Washington for strikes on Iran, he was making a completely separate set of calls to
Thran. In January as American and Israeli threats against Iran were intensifying, NBS personally called
Iranian President Massud Peshkian. The content of that call has not been fully disclosed, but Iranian officials later described it as a reassuring
conversation. NBS expressing his desire for peace and stability, his opposition to any military escalation, his
commitment to the normalization agreement. At the same time, NBS's brother, Defense Minister Prince Khaled bin Salman, was in Washington for
meetings with Pentagon officials. The message from Riad to Washington was entirely different. The kingdom supports American strength in the region. The
kingdom is concerned about Iranian capabilities. The kingdom is a reliable partner. This is what scholars of diplomacy call a two-track strategy. But calling it that almost undersells it.
MBS was simultaneously reassuring his enemy that the attack was not coming while ensuring to the people launching the attack that the target was sufficiently distracted and unprepared.
Whether you call that brilliant or ruthless depends entirely on your perspective. What you cannot call it is accidental. On February th, at
approximately G in the morning, Tran time, the United States and Israel launched what they would call Operation Epic Fury. Within hours, the world woke
up to a conflict of a scale that nobody outside a small circle of planners had anticipated. US forces had spent months,
possibly years, mapping Iranian military infrastructure with extraordinary precision. In the opening hours of the operation, American Bbombers launched
from bases, including Diego Garcia and the continental United States dropped bunker busting munitions on Iran's most deeply buried nuclear and missile
facilities. Simultaneously, Israeli F-jets refueled over Saudi airspace,
airspace that Riad quietly made available, struck command centers, air defense installations, and senior leadership targets in and around Tran.
And in the most strategically significant strike of the opening salvo,
a USIsraeli joint operation killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Kami. The man who had led the Islamic Republic for years. The man who was the
ideological backbone of the axis of resistance. The man whose network of proxies had reshaped the Middle East was gone within hours of the strikes
beginning. The initial military effectiveness was overwhelming. Israeli military commanders announced that within the first week, their forces had
destroyed approximately % of Iran's air defense network and at least % of its longrange missile launch capability.
US Central Command reported striking nearly targets in Iran in the first days alone. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, one
of Washington's most respected defense think tanks, calculated the cost of the first hours of Operation Epic Fury
at $billion, roughly $million per day. And the vast majority of that cost, more than $billion, had not
been budgeted for. The United States had launched a war that its own Congress had not voted for, had not fully funded, and had not debated. Now, here is where the
story shifts from the military dimension to something far more consequential for the global economy and for every person watching this video, regardless of where
you live. Because what happened next in the Gulf was not just a regional military escalation. It was the opening act of an economic crisis that analysts
are already comparing to the worst supply shocks in modern history. Iran,
facing an existential assault on its government, its military, and its nuclear program, did exactly what it had promised to do for years. It hit back
hard and it hit everywhere. Within hours of the first American strikes,
Iranian ballistic missiles and drones began raining down on nine countries simultaneously. Not just Israel, which had been anticipated, but the Gulf States hosting American military bases,
Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq,
Oman, and beyond. The numbers are almost impossible to comprehend. Iran fired over ballistic and naval missiles in the first four days. It launched approximately drones. Roughly %
of those were aimed at Israel. Roughly % were aimed at US military targets across the region and at the civilian and economic infrastructure of the Gulf
states that Iran blamed for enabling the attack. Dubai was struck. Abu Dhabi was struck. Doha was struck. Riyad was
struck. The US embassy in Kuwait was hit and closed indefinitely. Iranian ballistic missiles landed on Saudi soil for the first time in modern history.
The eastern province, home to the kingdom's most critical oil infrastructure, the King Abdulaziz air base, and the processing facilities through which a significant fraction of the world's oil flows every single day,
was directly targeted. Saudi Arabia's official statement claimed no casualties, but the message was unmistakable. Iran was willing to burn the Gulf to the ground on its way down.
And then Iran did something that every global energy market had dreaded for four decades. A senior IRGC official announced that Iranian forces would set
fire to any ship attempting to pass through the straight of Hormuz. The straight of Hormuz,
mi wide at its narrowest point, the single most important choke point in the global energy system. Every single day,
between and million barrels of oil pass through that straight, roughly %
of all the oil traded by sea in the entire world. Qatar, the world's largest exporter of liqufied natural gas, ships its product through the Strait of
Hormuz. The UAE ships through it. Saudi Arabia ships through it. Kuwait ships through it. And the moment an IRGC commander threatened to close it, the
moment Iranian forces began targeting tankers in the Gulf, the global energy market went into a full-scale panic. Oil prices surged to their highest level
since September A US flagged tanker called the Stenna Imperative was struck. A Honduras flagged tanker called
the Ath Nova was struck. Insurance rates for vessels transiting the Gulf spiked to levels that made commercial shipping economically catastrophic. Major
shipping companies began diverting routes around the Cape of Good Hope,
adding weeks and enormous additional cost to every energy shipment. The Straight of Hormuz had not been fully closed, but it did not need to be. The
mere credible threat of closure was enough to send shock waves through every commodity market on Earth. But before we get to the tanker fires and the energy markets, there's one more piece of the
military picture from those opening hours that deserves your full attention.
Because the scale of what Iran launched in retaliation, the missiles, the drones spread across nine countries simultaneously, was not just a
military response. It was a message. A message written in fire and sent to every government in the region that had cooperated with, enabled, or simply
failed to prevent the American and Israeli attack. Iran was telling the Gulf states, "You opened your airspace,
you hosted the planes, you provided the logistics, and you will pay a price for that." Every country that had quietly cooperated with the US military presence
in the Gulf, every government that had allowed American air defense systems to operate from its territory, every leadership that had signed status of forces agreements, giving US troops
access to its bases, found itself under Iranian missile and drone attack within hours of the opening strikes. This was Iran's version of deterrence. Not
deterrence that prevented the war. That ship had sailed, but deterrence designed to prevent the next war. A brutal,
undeniable demonstration that the cost of hosting American military power is not abstract. It is ballistic. It falls on your airports, your oil fields, your
desalination plants, and your capital cities. Let us pause here and make sure you understand what this means in terms that go beyond abstract geopolitics.
Because this is where the Iran war stops being a story about missiles and generals and starts being a story about your electricity bill, your grocery
prices, your fuel costs, and the value of the money in your bank account. The global economy runs on energy. Every product that is manufactured, every
piece of food that is grown and transported, every service that requires electricity or logistics, all of it is priced in relation to the cost of
energy. When the price of oil spikes dramatically, as it did in the hours and days after the straight of Hor's threat,
it does not just make gasoline more expensive at the pump. It creates an inflationary wave that moves through the entire economy like a slow motion shock wave. Manufacturers pay more for inputs.
Shipping companies charge more for delivery. Grocery stores pass higher costs to consumers. Central banks face an impossible dilemma. Do they raise interest rates to fight the inflation,
potentially triggering a recession? or do they hold rates steady and allow prices to spiral? There is no good answer to that question. And behind all of it, driving every pricing decision,
every investment choice, every political calculation is the question of whether that -m wide waterway in the Persian Gulf stays open or closes. The stock
markets reflected this terror in real time. Global equity indices fell sharply in the opening days of the conflict.
Defense stocks soared. Companies making missile interceptors, drone systems, and military electronics saw extraordinary gains. But the broader market moved deeply into risk-off territory.
Investors who had spent years building carefully diversified portfolios found themselves exposed to a geopolitical risk that no financial model had adequately priced in. Pension funds,
sovereign wealth funds, institutional investors. All of them were recalculating exposure to energy markets, to gul assets, to anything that
touched the supply chains running through the Middle East. The stock markets reflected this terror in real time. Global equity indices fell sharply in the opening days of the conflict.
Defense stocks soared. Companies making missile interceptors, drone systems, and military electronics saw extraordinary gains. But the broader market moved deeply into risk-off territory.
Investors who had spent years building carefully diversified portfolios found themselves exposed to a geopolitical risk that no financial model had adequately priced in. pension funds,
sovereign wealth funds, institutional investors, all of them were recalculating exposure to energy markets, to gul linked assets, to anything that touched the supply chains
running through the Middle East. Think about what this means for the average person on the street, not just the institutional investor in a glass tower.
When global shipping insurance premiums triple overnight because insurers are being asked to cover vessels transiting a potential war zone, those costs do not
disappear. They are passed on. They flow through the supply chain like water through a cracked pipe, eventually reaching the consumer in the form of
higher prices on fuel, on food, on electricity, on goods that were manufactured in Asia using Gulf energy and shipped through Gulf waters. The
inflation that results is not a choice any central bank makes. It is a mathematical consequence of a physical reality. The reality that % of the
world's seaborn oil passes through a straight that is now being actively threatened by a nation at war. And here's the element that makes this crisis particularly dangerous for the
global economy in a way that previous Middle East conflicts did not. The world is far more interconnected today than it was during the oil embargo or the
Gulf War of Supply chains are global, just in time, and extraordinarily fragile. A prolonged disruption to Gulf energy flows would
not just raise oil prices. It would create cascading failures across manufacturing, agriculture, technology,
and finance in ways that are genuinely difficult to predict and potentially very difficult to reverse. Egypt's president Abdel Fata Elsisi summed it up
publicly when he warned that his country, dependent on the Suez Canal revenue and on energy imports, was already in a state of near economic
emergency. And Egypt is not even in the Gulf. It is not hosting US military bases. It is not being directly struck by Iranian missiles. Yet, the ripple
effects of this conflict were already reaching Cairo within days of it starting. Imagine what they were doing to countries in Asia, to Japan, South
Korea, India, and China, which import massive quantities of Gulf energy, and whose entire economic models depend on the continued uninterrupted flow of oil
and gas through waters that were now suddenly a war zone. India received a special mention in the economic dimension of this crisis. The United
States issued a waiver allowing India to continue purchasing Russian crude oil. A recognition that forcing India to stop buying discounted Russian energy in the
middle of a Gulf supply crisis would be economically catastrophic for New Delhi and potentially push India further toward Moscow at precisely the moment
when Washington needed Asian allies to remain engaged and supportive. This single diplomatic footnote reveals the extraordinary complexity of managing a
major Middle East war in a multipolar world. Every decision made in Washington about military operations in Iran carries simultaneous economic and
diplomatic implications for relationships thousands of miles away.
Now let us come back to Saudi Arabia because this is where the narrative takes one of its most remarkable turns.
Remember what we established at the beginning of this analysis. NBS did not want this war or rather he wanted the outcome of this war but he did not want
Saudi Arabia to be caught in the crossfire. His entire vision economic transformation program depends on Saudi Arabia being perceived as a safe, stable, investable destination.
Neon, the futuristic city being built in the desert. The entertainment venues,
the Formula races, the golf tournaments, the tourist resorts on the Red Sea coast. All of that brand equity,
everything NBS has spent years and hundreds of billions of dollars building requires a Saudi Arabia that is free from the threat of Iranian missiles over
Riad. The moment Iranian ballistic missiles actually struck Saudi soil on February th, NBS faced the most acute crisis of his political career.
Not because he had not anticipated it.
He had his intelligence services had war gamed exactly this scenario. But anticipating a crisis and living through it are two very different things.
million people live in Riyad. Many of them had never experienced missile attack in their lives. The psychological and political impact of hearing Iranian missiles over the Saudi capital was
immense. And NBS knew that how he responded in the next hours would define his reign. His response was, and this must be acknowledged as a masterclass in crisis communication,
perfectly calibrated. The Saudi Foreign Ministry issued a statement within hours that condemned what it called the blatant and cowardly Iranian attacks,
reserved the right to respond with force, and simultaneously called on all parties to end the spiral of violence,
explicitly acknowledging that the United States and Israel had started the conflict. It was a statement that simultaneously satisfied Washington by
showing solidarity, satisfied the Saudi public by showing strength, and preserved Saudi Arabia's standing in the wider Arab and Muslim world by not
giving the Americans and Israelis a blank check. MBS was condemning the Iranian response to the very war he had privately helped engineer. The audacity
of it is almost breathtaking. And at the same moment, according to Middle East Eye, MBS was on the phone with the leaders of Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE. Not urging them to escalate,
but counseling restraint, arguing that the Gulf States needed to absorb the Iranian strikes without retaliating to preserve the diplomatic space for an
eventual ceasefire. He was playing every side simultaneously. He was the victim,
the statesman, the warrior, and the peacemaker all at once. Meanwhile, the UK entered the conflict in a way that added another dimension of strategic complexity. Prime Minister Kier Starmer,
after days of pressure from both Trump and opposition leader Kimmy Badno,
granted permission for the United States to use Royal Air Force bases, including RAF Fairford in Glstershare for operations against Iranian missile
sites. A ft BLancer bomber landed at Fairford, making the UK a direct participant in the conflict for the
first time. Iran's UN ambassador responded by warning that his country would take all necessary measures to defend itself and that Iranian forces
had already struck a UK military base in Cyprus. The circle of nations directly involved in this conflict was expanding with every passing hour. Ukraine offered
its own remarkable subplot. President Vladimir Zalinski, never wanted to miss a diplomatic opportunity, called NBS and the leaders of multiple Gulf states to
offer Ukraine's unique expertise in intercepting Iranian Shahed drones.
Ukraine's logic was elegant. Ukrainian forces had been fighting against Shahed drones for years, developing lowcost interception techniques using small,
cheap drones that cost betweenand $compared to the millions of dollars that each Patriot missile interceptor costs. While the Gulf States
were burning through their most expensive missile interceptors at a rate that was beginning to strain their inventories, Zilinsky was offering a
cheaper battle tested alternative. US President Trump said he would welcome assistance from any country. And just like that, the Russia Ukraine war and
the Iran USI Israel war became connected. Two separate conflicts sharing a common weapon system, a common threat, and now potentially a common
solution. Let us now look at what the opening nine days of Operation Epic Fury actually achieved in military terms because understanding the military
picture is essential to understanding the economic and geopolitical picture.
On the positive side for the USIsrael coalition, by day seven, Israeli military commanders claimed that % of Iran's air defense network had been
destroyed. % of Iran's longrange missile launch capability had been degraded. Hundreds of command and control nodes had been struck. The
nuclear program, which had already been set back by strikes in June was being systematically dismantled again.
Iran's supreme leader was dead. Iran's ability to launch coordinated large-scale missile strikes was declining daily with ballistic missile
attacks dropping % and drone attacks falling % from the first day to day seven. By any conventional military
metric, the opening phase of the campaign was extraordinarily successful.
The US and Israel had done in days what military planners had theorized might take months. But here is the question that the generals cannot answer
and that the financial markets are desperately trying to price. What comes next? Because military victory and strategic victory are not the same
thing. Destroying Iran's missile arsenal does not automatically produce a stable,
friendly government in Thran. Trump's demand for unconditional surrender was met almost immediately with defiance from Iran's foreign minister, who
rejected the idea of a ceasefire or new negotiations and stated that Iran was prepared even for the possibility of a US ground invasion. Iran's security
council secretary Ali Larajani issued a stark warning that Iranian forces were waiting for a potential US ground invasion and had prepared measures to kill and capture thousands of US troops.
The Iranian population rather than uniformly celebrating the removal of the regime that had suppressed them was deeply divided. Some taking to the streets and anti-government protests,
others rallying in nationalist solidarity against a foreign military attack on their homeland. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the Iranian people directly in Farsy,
urging them in his words to come out in millions to overthrow the regime of fear. But multiple experts pointed out that Iranians rallying against a foreign
attacker and Iranians rallying for democracy are not the same people making the same choice. The history of external military interventions aimed at
producing internal regime change is not encouraging. And the vision of a stable,
democratic, pro-western Iran emerging from the rubble of Thran in the near term was one that even some of Israel's own analysts described as, in the words
of former Israeli government adviser Daniel Levy, a kind of fairy tale. Trump characteristically offered his own framework. He announced that Iran had a
great future waiting for it. That once it surrendered unconditionally, the United States and its allies would help rebuild the country's shattered economy and make it bigger and stronger than
ever before. He also announced with remarkable directness that he intended to play a role in selecting Iran's next leader, explicitly calling Moshaba
Kamune, the late Supreme Leader's son and one leading candidate for succession an unacceptable choice. The extraordinary spectacle of an American
president publicly interviewing candidates for the leadership of a sovereign nation of million people was noted with alarm by governments from
Beijing to Brussels. China, which had brokered the Saudi Iran normalization deal and had significant economic interests in Iranian energy,
issued carefully worded calls for restraint without taking any concrete action. Russia, deeply involved in its own war in Ukraine was watching
carefully. Analysts noted that the Iran conflict might benefit Moscow if American weapons and attention that might have gone to Ukraine were now being diverted to the Middle East.
Europe was divided and largely paralyzed. Governments in Berlin, Paris,
and Rome calling for diplomacy while lacking any real leverage to enforce it.
The United Nations declared the conflict a major humanitarian emergency alongside the simultaneous Afghanistan Pakistan
war. But the Security Council remained gridlocked with Russia and China effectively blocking any decisive collective action. And so the world arrived at a moment that no spreadsheet,
no economic model, and no geopolitical framework had fully anticipated. A moment in which the United States was engaged in a full-scale military
campaign in Iran, the Strait of Hormuz was under threat, the Gulf States were absorbing Iranian missile strikes, the global economy was absorbing an oil
price shock, and the question of what happens on the other side of all of this had no clear answer. Let us now return to the man at the center of it all.
Because here is the final and most important layer of the MBS story, and it is the one that connects everything we have discussed into a single coherent
strategic vision. Muhammad bin Salman did not set this trap because he wanted chaos. He set it because he wanted order. His order on his terms in his
timeline. The scenario that NBS always feared was not a war. It was a war in which Saudi Arabia was the primary target. What he engineered, if the
reporting is accurate, is a war in which American and Israeli military power does the heavy lifting of dismantling Iran's capability, while Saudi Arabia plays the
role of victim statesmen, preserving its relationships with Washington, with Beijing, with Thran's potential successor government, and with the
broader Arab world all at once. If it works, if Iran's military is genuinely degraded, if a more pragmatic Iranian government eventually emerges, if the
straight of Hormuz reopens and energy markets stabilize, then MBS will have achieved in a matter of weeks what generations of Saudi strategists
considered impossible. The structural defanging of Saudi Arabia's most dangerous rival at zero direct cost to Riad in military terms. And with Saudi
Arabia positioned to lead the reconstruction of both Iran and the broader regional order in the aftermath,
that is the bet. And it is a bet of breathtaking ambition. But, and this is the part that the Saudi crown prince's
war room understands very clearly, it is also a bet that could go catastrophically wrong in multiple ways simultaneously. What if Iran does not
collapse? What if the regime holds together under the pressure of foreign attack, as historical precedent suggests, is quite possible? What if Iranian missiles keep flying and Saudi
dalination plants, the facilities that provide drinking water to millions of Saudi citizens, are struck and severely damaged? What if the straight of Hormuz
is not just threatened, but actually closed for an extended period, setting oil prices to levels that crash the global economy and dry up the investment
flows that vision depends on. What if the US, exhausted and domestically divided, pulls back before Iran is truly
neutralized, leaving a wounded and enraged Iran facing a Saudi Arabia that it knows was complicit in the attack? These are not hypothetical questions.
They are the scenarios that keep every serious analyst awake at night because the history of the Middle East is littered with brilliant strategic plans that survived first contact with the
enemy and then unraveled in ways their architects never predicted. The economic dimension of that risk cannot be overstated. Saudi Arabia's entire post
oil future depends on a specific set of conditions. Stable energy markets that keep government revenues flowing during the transition period, a security
environment that makes international investors comfortable placing capital in the kingdom. and a regional diplomatic posture that keeps Saudi Arabia from being drawn into direct military
confrontation with adversaries it cannot defeat alone. The Iran war threatens all three of those conditions simultaneously. Saudi Arabia's
defense budget of billion representing % of total government spending reveals both the kingdom's seriousness about security and the
extraordinary burden that sustained conflict places on its economic transformation agenda. Every Ryale spent on missile defense is a riyale not spent
on NEOM. Every investor who pauses to assess Gulf security risk is a partner that does not sign an agreement with Saudi Aramco or the public investment
fund. The war premium that attaches to Gulf assets when Iranian missiles are flying over Riad is not an abstraction.
It is a real cost measured in basis points and deal flows and capital allocations that compounds over time and makes NBS's targets harder to reach
with every passing week of conflict. And there is one more actor in this story who deserves careful attention because their choices will do more to determine the final outcome than any military
strike or diplomatic cable. That actor is the Iranian people themselves. million of them. A civilization with years of history. A population that has survived the Iran Iraq war,
international sanctions, economic mismanagement, and political repression.
And has demonstrated repeatedly that it is capable of extraordinary resilience.
The Western assumption baked into Trump's truth social posts and Netanyahu's Farsy language broadcasts that Iranians are simply waiting to be
liberated by American and Israeli bombs is not supported by any serious understanding of Iranian political culture. Yes, there were massive
protests in Iran in early driven by economic desperation and political frustration. Yes, some Iranians welcomed the weakening of the regime. But many
others, including Iranians who despised the Islamic Republic, were outraged by the killing of Kam, by the strikes on civilian areas, by the deaths of more
than a thousand of their fellow citizens, including children in schools,
the nationalism that foreign attacks tend to generate in civilian populations, is a powerful and historically consistent force. and an Iran that emerges from this conflict without a clear successor government,
without stability, with millions of displaced and traumatized citizens, and with its military infrastructure destroyed by its territorial integrity
intact. That Iran could become something even more dangerous than the Iran that existed before February th, And there is one more actor in this story
who deserves careful attention because their choices will do more to determine the final outcome than any military strike or diplomatic cable. That actor
is the Iranian people themselves, million of them. A civilization with years of history, a population that has survived the Iran Iraq war,
international sanctions, economic mismanagement, and political repression,
and has demonstrated repeatedly that it is capable of extraordinary resilience.
The Western assumption baked into Trump's truth social posts and Netanyahu's Farsy language broadcasts that Iranians are simply waiting to be
liberated by American and Israeli bombs is not supported by any serious understanding of Iranian political culture. Yes, there were massive
protests in Iran in early driven by economic desperation and political frustration. Yes, some Iranians welcomed the weakening of the regime. But many
others, including Iranians who despised the Islamic Republic, were outraged by the killing of Kamani, by the strikes on civilian areas, by the deaths of more
than a thousand of their fellow citizens, including children in schools,
the nationalism that foreign attacks tend to generate in civilian populations, is a powerful and historically consistent force. and an Iran that emerges from this conflict without a clear successor government,
without stability, with millions of displaced and traumatized citizens, and with its military infrastructure destroyed, but its territorial integrity
intact, that Iran could become something even more dangerous than the Iran that existed before February th,
Consider the history. When the United States invaded Iraq in it dismantled a military regime in three weeks of combat. What followed was a decade of insurgency, civil war,
sectarian conflict, the rise of ISIS,
and a regional destabilization that is still reverberating years later. When NATO intervened in Libya in Mama Gaddafi's regime collapsed within
months. What followed was a decade and a half of civil war, a failed state, a human trafficking crisis on the Mediterranean, and a power vacuum that was filled by competing militias,
foreign powers, and armed extremist groups. The pattern of external military intervention producing rapid regime change followed by prolonged instability
is not an exception in modern geopolitical history. It is the rule.
And if that pattern holds in Iran, a country with four times Iraq's population, a far more sophisticated political culture, significant regional influence even in its weakened state,
and a nuclear program whose remnants and expertise do not disappear, even if the physical infrastructure is destroyed,
then the post-war landscape could be far more complex and dangerous than anyone in Washington or Tel Aviv is publicly acknowledging. There's also the Lebanon
dimension. Israel, in parallel with its operations in Iran, was conducting intensive strikes on Lebanon, targeting Hezbollah positions and infrastructure.
Hundreds of thousands of Lebanese civilians were displaced. The Lebanese government, trying to thread an impossible needle between Hezbollah's domestic political power and the
Lebanese state's desperate desire to stay out of another war, announced it would ban Hezbollah's military activities and demanded the group hand
over its weapons. Hezbollah had previously said it would only disarm if Israel fully withdrew from Lebanon, a condition Israel showed no sign of
meeting. And the UN's human rights chief was warning that Lebanon risked becoming a key flash point in a conflict that was already consuming the wider region. The
Houthis in Yemen, meanwhile, were taking the remarkable step of restraint, condemning the attack on Iran in words,
but declining to resume missile attacks on Red Sea shipping, apparently calculating that they could not afford to open another front while Yemen's
civil war remained unresolved. This careful, healthy restraint was itself a strategic signal. The axis of resistance was fragmenting under the pressure of
sustained military degradation and strategic uncertainty. So where does this leave us? Where does all of this lead? The honest answer, the answer that
any serious analyst must give it is that we do not know. We are nine days into a conflict whose trajectory is genuinely uncertain. The scenarios range from an
Iranian regime collapse and a negotiated transition that reshapes the Middle East in a generation all the way to a prolonged war of attrition that destabilizes the global economy,
exhausts American military resources,
creates a political backlash in the United States that ends the conflict on ambiguous terms, and leaves a wounded,
radicalized Iran seeking revenge for decades to come. The gap between those scenarios is vast. And in that gap, in that uncertainty, lies the greatest
geopolitical and economic risk of our time. But here is what we can say with confidence. The world of February th,
the world that existed the night before the first American bombs fell onto Iran, is gone. The axis of resistance that Iran spent years
building, is severely weakened. The question of Iranian nuclear capability,
which dominated global diplomacy for two decades, has been answered militarily in a way that treaties and negotiations never resolved. The role of Saudi Arabia
as a regional power has been permanently elevated. Whether NBS intended it or not, the kingdom is now the central surviving regional actor. The nation
that absorbed Iranian missiles without being destroyed, the state that preserved its relationships with every major power simultaneously, and the
economy that, if the conflict concludes favorably, stands to benefit most from the reconstruction of the Gulf order.
The global energy system has been reminded in the most visceral possible way that its dependence on a -m wide waterway in the Persian Gulf is not a
theoretical vulnerability. It is a real one. And the reckoning that produces the accelerated push toward energy diversification, the recalculation of
supply chain geography, the repricing of geopolitical risk across every asset class will shape investment decisions,
political choices, and economic outcomes for years, possibly decades to come. And Muhammad bin Salman, the man who may have done more than any other single
individual to bring this moment into being, sits in Riad watching the results of his gamble unfold in real time. He is years old. He has decades of power
ahead of him, assuming the kingdom remains stable. He has staked his legacy, his economic transformation project, and the future of his dynasty
on the bet that America and Israel would do what Saudi Arabia could not do alone.
That they would remove the Iranian threat at their cost in their blood and treasure. And that Riyad would emerge on the other side stronger, safer, and more
central to the new Middle Eastern order than at any point in modern history.
Whether that bet pays off, whether history records MBS as the shrewdest strategic mind of his generation, or as the man whose miscalculation triggered a catastrophe he could not control,
remains to be written. what has already been written. In the smoke rising over Thran, in the missile fragments scattered across Riyad, in the tanker
fires burning in the Gulf of Omen, in the trading floors of London and New York and Shanghai, where oil prices are being repriced in real time, is the
opening chapter of a story that will define this decade and perhaps the century that follows. It is not just a Middle East story. This is not just a
war between countries that are far away from where you live. This is a story about who controls the energy that powers the global economy. About who sits at the center of the financial
architecture that connects the world's wealth. about whether the rules-based international order that has governed global affairs since can survive
the kind of raw unapologetic power politics that we are watching unfold in real time and about whether one man a
crown prince sitting in a palace in Riad playing chess with the fates of nations was brilliant enough to make the most dangerous gamble in modern geopolitical history pay off. The answer is coming.
We are all watching it arrive. Let us also consider what this conflict reveals about the nature of power in the st century. Because there's a lesson here
that goes far beyond the immediate crisis. For most of the postcold war era, we operated under the assumption that power derived from one of two
sources, military capability or economic size. The United States had both. China was building both. Russia was trying to maintain both. and smaller nations,
nations like Saudi Arabia, Israel, the UAE, were assumed to operate within the strategic space that the great powers defined for them. What NBS appears to
have demonstrated, if the analysis of his role in engineering this conflict is accurate, is that a third form of power has emerged in the st century, the
power of financial entanglement. the power of making yourself so economically indispensable to the decision makers of great powers that you can effectively
shape their strategic choices without ever deploying your own military force. Saudi Arabia did not need to bomb Iran. It needed to fund the right people,
invite the right investments, host the right conversations, and ensure that the financial interests of those who control American foreign policy were aligned
with Saudi Arabia's strategic objectives. If that is what happened here and again the financial relationships are documented and the private lobbying is reported then the
implications for how we think about international relations are profound because it means that the era of purely military deterrence is over. It means
that financial architecture is now as strategically important as military architecture. And it means that the battles of the st century will be fought not just with missiles and drones, but with investment funds,
cryptocurrency stakes, real estate deals, and the quiet, persistent cultivation of financial dependencies in the capitals of the world's most
powerful nations. This is not a comfortable thought. It is a deeply unsettling one. Because financial influence of this kind operates in the
shadows. It is hard to see, hard to regulate, and hard to hold accountable through the normal mechanisms of democratic oversight. The American Congress did not vote for the Iran war.
The American public was not fully consulted. And yet, the war happened,
launched by an executive who had deep and wellocumented financial ties to the governments that stood most directly to benefit from it. Whether that
constitutes the corruption of democratic foreign policymaking or simply the normal operation of great power interests is a debate that democratic
societies are going to be forced to have loudly and urgently in the months and years ahead. If you want to stay ahead of this story, if you want to understand
not just what is happening, but why it is happening and what comes next, make sure you follow this channel because we are going to continue tracking every development in this conflict, every economic signal, every diplomatic move,
and every strategic shift as they unfold. The world is changing faster right now than at any point in a generation and understanding how it is
changing is the most important thing any of us can do. The straight of hormuz is still technically open as of today.
Whether it stays that way and what happens to the global economy if it does not is the question that should be on everyone's mind. We will be here to help you make sense of it. One final thought
before we close. Um there's a dimension of the story that almost nobody in the Western press is discussing and it may ultimately prove to be the most consequential of all. It is the question
of what this conflict does to the credibility of the global non-prololiferation system. For three decades, the international community has
operated on the assumption that the most effective way to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons is through diplomacy,
inspection regimes, multilateral agreements, and economic sanctions. The JCPOA, the nuclear deal with Iran that was negotiated in and then
abandoned by Trump in was the centerpiece of that approach. It was imperfect. It was limited in scope. Its critics argued with genuine substance
that it delayed rather than permanently resolve the Iranian nuclear question.
But it represented the best available multilateral framework for managing one of the most dangerous proliferation challenges the world had ever faced.
What happens to that framework now? What message does every other country in the world, every government that is watching the Iran conflict and drawing its own
conclusions, take from the fact that Iran's nuclear program was ultimately not resolved through diplomacy, but destroyed through military force? The
message is not comfortable. The message is if you want to deter the United States and Israel from attacking you,
you need to have a nuclear weapon before they decide to strike. Not after,
before. The North Korean leadership is watching. Whatever remains of Iran's nuclear knowledge and expertise is dispersed. And that expertise does not
disappear when buildings are bombed. It lives in the minds of scientists who will eventually find new patrons, new states, new programs. The long-term
proliferation consequences of the Iran war, the signal it sends about the futility of negotiated disarmament without security guarantees could haunt
the world long after the immediate conflict is over. That is the darkest possible reading of where we are. And it deserves to be said clearly and directly
alongside every other dimension of this extraordinary, terrifying, worldaltering moment in history. We are living through events that future generations will
study for centuries. Make sure you understand

[admin]

Alastair Crooke: Iran's Missiles AVENGE Larijani, Tel Aviv BURNS as Trump Panics
Danny Haiphong
Streamed live 5 hours ago #iran #trump #israel

Former UK Diplomat and Middle East expert Alastair Crooke joins to discuss Iran's massive retaliation for the decapitation strike that took out Ali Larijani head of the National Security Council, and a full break down of the Iran war.



Transcript

Welcome everyone. Welcome back to the show. It's your host Danny Hiong. As you can see, I am joined by Alistister Crook. He's a former UK diplomat and
expert on all things Middle East geopolitical analyst. Alistister, great to be back with you today.
Thank you very much. It's also a pleasure to join you.
Yes, it's great. Everyone hit the like button as we get started as that will help boost this show. But Alistair,
let's get started right away. So yesterday over the last hours was uh wave number of Operation True Promise
According to many reports at least sites were hit in Tel Aviv. Uh the sensors have been breaking of late in
recent days and weeks as this war continues. Um a major train station was hit. It seems like the escalation
against Israel is according to Iran is in large part because of the assassination of Ali Larajani which
happened in the last hours. The head of the National Security Council. Now uh in the hours before this show,
Israel has hit uh major gas lines in the south of Iran, I believe. And now Iran,
as we were talking about before the program, Alistister, is looking to target gas and oil fields all across the Gulf States in the region, Kuwait,
Qatar, etc. I'll pull up some of those images, but I want your reaction to uh where we are in this war now as we enter
as we are now in the third week and uh as the escalations on all side become sides be especially the US-Israeli side
become very inconsistent and uh almost halfhazard. What's your assessment of the situation?
Uh well essentially despite what has happened uh to Larijani
um uh who was the head of the if you like the security apparatus the the
supreme national security council. um his uh loss, I mean, will be felt and
also as often is the case with Israeli assassinations,
uh uh it often um they often target the most moderate people and they are
replaced by people that are more hardline. We don't know who's going to replace him, but he was um he was a very
learned person, a very intellectual uh clever man. He um was a philosopher and his he will be lost. He was also,
you know, to a certain extent with his connections to the reformists. So he was a centrist more than anything else. Um
and of course he will as you know it's the standard practice it has been in Iran uh to um anoint and have prepared
your successor and your successor's successor as well. Everyone has to do that these days since the beginning of
the war. It's mandatory for all the military and for all the political leaders uh to or have a successor who's
ready just to step straight into the shoes. Um and the war itself won't be much changed by it because the war has
been is led really by Khalibah the former mayor um who is a military former
military officer. Um he was also speaker of parliament. Um he's a formidable uh
uh figure uh um and much admired in Iran and he has been in charge of the the
side of the immediate response to events on the ground. It doesn't always go to the full security council. There is a
smaller, more specific, more expert committee of military and technical
officials that deal with the war as it unfolds. And Khalibar has been managing that really since the outset. And indeed
during the he was the person managing if you like the response to the um violent
protests uh uh that took place um uh uh in January.
And uh uh Alistister, what do you make of these reports? I know that you said on conflict forums there you're you're
publishing a very important piece that's coming out u very soon and there's also reports I think that go along with uh
what you are about to release that talk about how uh Israel is having not only a lot of difficulties with the missile
fire and the fact that they are likely running out of uh interceptors as we speak as Iran hits them every single day
since February th But now Israel is uh according to a cable that the state department has uh has leaked to
Washington Post said that they told their US counterparts they hope for an uprising even though it lead to a massacre. But that cable said that Iran
is not cracking and it's willing to fight till the end leading to a need to re-evaluate the goals of the war. What have you made of of this uh Alistister?
Because over the course of this war, now we are into week three. Um it appears while the escalations continue and the and the strikes continue on Iran,
there's a lot of questions about even an intel officer, the number two I believe to Tulsi Gabbard now leaving. There's a
lot of questions about Joe Kent. There's a lot of questions about what exactly not only is this war for, but is it is it winnable at all?
Well, those are big questions, but let me first of all say in these last few days because we follow the news,
particularly the Hebrew uh channels very carefully, the Hebrew press, um what we
have seen has been quite a noticeable shift. The vibe is different, very very
different in these last few days. And people have been saying, well, it's time for Trump to declare victory and to get
out. I mean, senior military officials from Israel are saying this and others
are saying the same. And so, for these days, it's it's been very odd. I mean,
for us, we've looked at it and you can see that something has been taking place, but it's not clear what that is.
I mean that's obvious from the whole range of comments that were coming in
about three or four days ago and recently as yesterday and the day before when you look at the Hebrew press there
was no comments about the war. I mean it was just off the pages. There was um
commentaries about rivalries between coalition partners in the government and
who might be going up and who might be going down and other ones about legal aspects and the attorney general and so
on. But everyone seemed to be avoiding the big issue, the elephant in the room,
the war with Iran. And it wasn't clear why or what was really going on.
However, today it seems we've got some inkling of what's been happening or what is happening because Yedanot,
which is a Hebrew paper, uh has an interview uh with Ronan Bergman. Ronan Bergman is a sort of premier political
correspondent. He also writes for the New York Times um in uh the US. Um but he's renown and a serious commentator.
uh and he writes in his column uh today that Netanyahu has has given up um on
the total victory which you know has been his theme for all this time. He's given up and Bergman says that Netanyahu
has saying that it is clear that um and this is a big change on the part of
Netanyahu. Netanyahu is saying, you know, we're not going to achieve the success we hope for in Iran. Um, we're
not going to um destroy the state. The state is not going to fall. There's not going to be an overthrow of the state by an opposition. It's not going to happen.
Um, and uh we are going to have to redefine our victory in different ways.
And he goes on to say that you know we still have these other wars and Bergman says well and you know the wars are not
going well whether it's in um Gaza with Hamas or whether it's in Lebanon or
whether it is elsewhere for example in Iraq I mean all of these are fairing
badly. So, how are we going to re re redefine victory? And then Yahoo comes up with a strange sort of formula
saying, well, you know, it Iran was a threat, but it's not existential threat anymore. It's just a threat and we have
other threats. Threats go up, threats go down, and you know, we have our alliances and our forms and we are
emerging as a global power thanks to these efforts.
um it really doesn't hold together very convincingly, but this is this is the story that he's putting out. But at the
same time, Katz is announcing that henceforth any Iranian official that they identify
or can locate uh they will kill um automatically. It doesn't need authorization. blanket authorization is
given to kill all and any Iranians that they can see and identify. So
that's an escalation on that part. Uh the second big escalation that has
happened just in this period um today effectively was that um I don't know who
led this whether it seems as if it was led by uh Israel but that they are the
reports indicate that it was with the green light from the US from Trump the
attack on um the gas field south path pass. South Pass is this huge gas field
which is shared with Gata. It's divided between the two, but this provides much
of the um gas resources for Iran. It is a it is a serious source of energy for
Iran in terms of the gas. And so what we've seen in consequence uh or um in
addition to it is that now um the IRGC
has warned uh five gas and uh oil
facilities throughout the Gulf that to be evacuated that all the staff must leave it immediately.
Uh and we've seen overnight a huge escalation in response to the assassination of um
Ali Larijani, the head of the National Security Council uh in um in in Tehran.
Apparently he was uh they managed to identifying him identify him staying uh
overnight in an apartment um of his um by his daughter I think and so so uh
they're all killed and all his security detail are called killed too. So there
has been a massive attack um into Israel and Hezbollah has also been pummeling
the center of Israel. Major attack across Israel um from Hezbollah. Um, of
course, you know, the censorship uh in Israel is is near total and as yet I
mean the Israelis I mean very deliberately and we have evidence of this that the Israelis are careful when
you see um a film which purports to show some sort of the result of a strike by
Iran in Israel. what you generally see is a little bit of debris uh lying around and or perhaps a damaged car and
we're told you know light or no injuries and um we know because um an Israeli
journalist has has said this uh that actually what's happening is it's deliberate the Israeli official
journalists um or broadcasting um uh journalists are going and they deliberately avoid showing any main
damage, but just focus on something trivial,
a sort of damaged car or some debris um on the street as if they're acting as real journalists, as if they're giving a
picture of what's happening. And it's not the picture at all. they're just deliberately filming a sort of minimal
sort of effect um and publishing that as if that's all all all all that happens.
So total we we don't know and Israel too I mean it's been sort of rather a magical war from that side because you
know every time it was you know no no injuries claimed or you know
one Sri Lankan was injured as a result of this attack. Uh and I think this is the first day that they've actually said that two people were killed. Otherwise,
this is a war, you know, where there apparently according to the Israeli studies, they've not admitted really to
to any deaths. A few injuries, people are in hospital, but no, I mean, it's a bit like America. America's doing the
same thing pretty much. How many people are dead or killed? Oh, well, you won't get those from the United States from
Hexath. He just says, well, six people died in that refueling tanker that came down in in Iraq. And others, there are
injuries, but they're all back in in service. They're all part of they've been rehabilitated into service again.
So um the idea that no one has been killed or injured in the attacks you know across a bill where there's been
heavy attacks on American um bases in a
bill and in Iraq um you know people apparently have had some psychological
effects but light injuries. So we don't know we don't know what's been attacked.
We do know that there have been um serious attacks with the some of the advanced weapons. The Koram Sha weapon
um was clearly being used um towards Israel uh last night. But what effect
these are having, we don't know. But it's really instructive now to learn that Netanyahu is trying to uh reverse
his narrative. Instead of calling for um the big war, the war that he persuaded Trump um to lead on um this war is now,
he says, not going to be um pursued because it's um if you like, it's
unwinable. They're not going to achieve their main objectives. They're still going to go after Iran as other
adversaries. But it's going to be redefined in a new way. It's going to be
redefined as uh that the that Israel has these threats, but these threats are not
absolute. They are relative. They go up and they go down. And there are other threats. and we have different threats
and we will win in all of them and that is going to be our victory. But actually
uh def destroying Iran and having um uh collapsing uh the the the state is no
longer uh possible likely to be achieved and therefore is not on the agenda anymore. big change and it comes at a time when Trump is escalating.
Yeah. Yeah. Maybe you can talk about uh how how Trump is escalating here because as you said uh the sensors are just
incredible. uh Israel was obviously preparing for uh what Iran was going to do and has tried to cover up all of the
damage as much as it can or as you said highlight that it's uh targeting so-called civilians rather than making
uh huge damage on uh Israeli infrastructure. I'll just show here there have been some getting out. Uh
there are power outages across the uh capital or you know at least the capital as the world recognizes it. Tel Aviv. Uh
there's also been just massive images of last night of these uh missiles that uh Iran has been launching, especially
those so-called cluster missiles at Kashima which have been used for many days now. And uh it's not just in the uh
against Israel, they've been used there have been images over Dubai of these munitions, these submunitions being released from this missile in the sky.
And many have noted that it's it's pretty unprecedented uh that Iran is using these and uh really evading all
these air defenses. But uh to your point, Alistair, if you could react to the energy question because prices, as I
was showing as you were talking, uh they continue to go up. uh seems like a big uh escalation the US is pursuing is the
continuation of trying to either seize Iran's o you know uh Car Island, cut it off from its own oil production, supply
and trade. Uh but at the same time, this has massive effects on oil prices. So much so to the point that Qatar reacted
to what Israel did. Um they released a statement uh uh reacting to this that I'll pull up uh opposing it because they
have uh uh been affected dramatically by Iran's drone strikes and missile strikes
uh now go that are going to target their energy infrastructure specifically uh although they have been doing it to a
degree even up till now. So your reaction to this, how how does this play out in the war? Because this is what a lot of the mainstream media is talking
about right now is how this is going to affect the energy question.
Well, in word, it's going to affect it badly.
It was um Iran had been careful uh not to affect the not to bomb or or strike
at the infrastructure, the energy infrastructure until now. It it yes, you know, um uh storage tanks and others
were attacked, but their focus was much more on ports. Um and that had a different objective to it was on ports,
but it was about the Homo straight and about changing the geopolitical balance
um within the region. Ports are important because particularly Bahrain port which is borne the brunt of
this was the home to the fifth fleet but it was a home to much more. It was a home to a major intelligence gathering
center, to radars, to administrative centers, um to munitions, a whole
intelligence infrastructure um uh was based in Bahrain and that's been systematically destroyed. And part of this is to reestablish,
if you like, Iranian um control over the whole of the Homos corridor. Um and this
um and I this is deliberately to if you like flip the whole geopolitical
strategy because this was you know the Americans have controlled you know the
Red Sea and Horos through the fifth fleet and the Red Sea up until the Houthies um started their work on it.
But they have controlled that and the object and um Trump has made this very clear is to have a dominance over the
choke points and the sea corridors, the navigation corridors of the globe. Um
first of all to squeeze China to squeeze China's um uh oil inputs. I mean, we
that was what Venezuela was largely about because most of Venezuelan oil uh was heading to head heading to to to
China. Um and it's also about squeezing in the other direction. It's been about squeezing Russian oil. Uh the if you
like the seizure of tankers, the attacks on tankers um in the Black Sea and in
the Baltic. I mean all of this was quite clearly you know the new war was to sort
of try and suppress Chinese economic development by limiting its energy
supply. Uh and uh secondly it it was if you like um to stop Russian
exports of oil. So they are now reestablishing and taking if you like I
I because you know they even attack ports in Oman. Oman has been friendly to to to
Iran but because that is part of the network of American attempts to dominate um the sea um and navigation routes.
So that has been um an important element. So by and large they've left the actual infrastructure of energy
untouched until today and that was because um Trump agreed or
greenlighted according to the Israelis an attack on South P's gas field and
South P's uh field that serves Iran. So now it's all restraint is off and um
Iran feels free to attack all uh oil installation. Of course it's going to
have a big effect on the economy. Of course it's going to affect particularly
Gulf states. But finally I mean the Gulf States have to uh probably at some point
decide where they stand on this war. I mean until now they've been firmly in
the Washington um if you like ambit they have been completely you know
Americanized and Israeli dependent on for technology and for AI and um for um
now increasingly tourism uh it has been but all of that's changed I mean the business model of the Gulf is broken I
mean you Some people will stay on in Dubai and other places maybe, but there's been a big exodus uh from Dubai.
Not just tourists, but other people who say they're not going back because it's not. It's broken. We went there because
we thought it was safe, secure, and you know, plenty of money to be earned there. Now, it's not so safe, not so
secure, and not so much money going to be around. So the the Gulf states have to decide. I mean they will be dependent
on Iran for the their revenue from now not from the United States but Iran can
either green light their vessels to pass um through the straits of Hormuz or not.
And furthermore,
a a state like UAE uh imports all its food through Hormuz as well. Uh UA uh
data exports its gas through Hormuz. All of these are going to be subject to the permission being granted um uh by Iran.
Um so this is going to continue to be a a vital issue in this period and
um the ability of the west to do anything about it is very very very small to being almost non-existent.
The reason being and we've heard from Trump frequently you know oh well we've sunk their navy. Well, Iran really
didn't have a navy in the proper sense of it deliberately because navies are sort of vulnerable now. They don't have
battleships and carriers or anything like that. But what they do have is real deterrence because they have first of
all uh underwater um drones that move very fast, can be
directed and can be and find their own targets. very rapid. They're like sort of high-speed torpedoes. Very little,
very difficult to do anything about those. Then they have unmanned surface drones, i.e. like effectively like a speedboat packed with these explosives.
Um, but that also moves very fast and can be steered so that it can zigzag around and that I think you probably
seen videos has uh indeed struck um an American link tanker and it ended up in
flames. Um but that's not the end of it because then they have small small surface vessels which um like speedboats
but which carry um anti-hship missiles too. And then you have beyond that uh
Iran has submarines that can fire uh anti-ship missiles while submerged.
Um so this is this is their navy. It's not a battleship or a frigot. It is
these small very fast vessels and submarines. And you know it's all been thought through. And this is asymmetrical warfare. You don't need,
they didn't need a frigot there or anything like this. This would be pointless. But I wouldn't like to be the frigot or the tanker that tries to get
through Hormuz. And they don't even need to use those because um actually from
the center point and they're making sure that people have to move past Kesh Island now, which is the narrowest
point. That's kilometers um from Iran, which means that the whole of that area is under fire control from back,
not from the coastal areas, but further back. Um artillery can reach all of that
area um easily. Um so that is I mean uh I I would think it's no surprise that no
one has volunteered to escort a tanker through this. I mean, the the the the
Iranians control this uh utterly. What they're going to do with two and a half thousand Marines supposedly arriving in the next week or more, I have no idea.
But the coast, the Iranian coast uh um of Horos is
kilometers long, which means you've got it would be about one
American marine per kilometer over that coastline. Are they going to take that?
And how are they going to suppress the artillery, let alone the the missiles that are honeycombed into that shore? As
I say, you know, the Iranians have been preparing this for a very long time.
This is asymmetrical warfare and it has been thought out and it seems, you know,
and Trump said, "Oh, we didn't expect this." You know, we didn't think they were going to. I didn't think they would shut Horos. Come on. I mean, the
Iranians have said that that they would if they were attacked, Hormos would be shut for the long term. They said that.
I kept saying it. I think I probably said it on your program. That's what they would do and they've done it.
And so what can America or Europe do about it? Uh nothing except um finally
they will have to come to terms with Iran. But the terms that Iran will impose on the United States to um get
the e economics um crisis resolved are going to be I think beyond um if you like the capacity
of the United States to tolerate that degree of um retreat and humiliation. It
it will be uh a lifting of all sanctions on Iran, a return of all their frozen
assets. It it will include also um uh the end to all conflicts. Um it will
include the continued enrichment of um uranium that nuclear project and it
would also include I am almost certain the demand for Israeli withdrawal from
Gaza and an end to what is happening in um the West Bank. So that will be, I
think, quite hard for Washington to digest, but that's basically what they'd have to contemplate to to to set this right.
Yeah. I I I mean that's exactly what Iran is putting out there as proposals,
demands, whatever one wants to call them. But they are they are operating Iran is with the uh understanding that
they are in fact uh dictating terms. Uh uh Alistister and I wanted to ask you,
you know, there was a there was a piece in the Financial Times and it talks about how with what you just described,
uh this has essentially uh conclude this essentially imposed a conclusion on the world that the era of US dominance and
economic warfare is over. specifically citing something we've mentioned here on this show many times before, which is that sanctions are obviously just a tool
to open up a wider war like we're seeing on Iran and that Iran has essentially flipped this against the United States and the entire world. Now,
I wanted to ask you, you know, a lot of questions, Alistister, have been raised about Iran given that uh the US Sentcom,
they're putting out all kinds of data that looks very impressive. if it looks like the US is causing all kinds of
destruction that could uh change the outcome of this war. For example,
Sentcom just said that they dropped bunker busters on the coastline and destroyed some of those anti-ship missile systems that you were describing
there. No, of course Iran says differently. Um but also they've said they've hit tens of thousands of targets. Iran says those are mostly
civilian targets and Iran has not uh at least uh it hasn't been documented yet.
For example, the F-s that have been standoff striking Iran, uh Iran hasn't been able to hit them. And some have asked in this audience, Alistar, why why
is it that uh the US and Israel are able to hit Iran like they have been? uh and what is the veracity and the uh validity
of USIsraeli claims to this kind of dominance they say they're imposing despite the fact that uh you know you have the Financial Times talking about
this very important maybe the most important part of this war which is the economic realm uh being firmly in the hands and the grips of Iran's dictated
terms that's quite a wide area that you've just outlined um but um let's start
First of all, you know, what I've tried to get across to people repeatedly, um,
for me, this is sort of deja vu because I saw so much of this playing out when I
was in Lebanon and during the war uh, in the south, the war of uh, Israel
against Hezbollah at at the time. But first of all, the most important point to make is, you know, you can't compare,
you know, two things that are completely dislike, apples and oranges. You don't say, you know, which is better, which is, you know, tastier or something.
They're different. And Iran has been pursuing, if you like, um, an asymmetrical war. They've been planning
for it and preparing for it for years. They've thought about it deeply.
They have uh established a a system of decentralized command so that a decapitation does not stop the system.
In fact, by establishing a whole series of commands right across the whole
extent of Iran with commanders with pre-desated targets to pursue in the
event of a war or the loss of a command or communications with Thran. Um they
have um given them missiles. They sit on missiles capabilities. They have forces
and they have the key thing is the initiative to pursue the war according to their instructions, their sealed
instructions as soon as a supreme leader is killed. Only a supreme leader has the authority to change any of those
instructions or to change the planning for the war. So when the supreme leader was killed immediately within an hour uh
the targets in the Gulf states were being hit very quickly because as I say all this is pre-organized pre-arranged
so you know all the claims we hear from America about you know that they've you know killed the commander the leaders of
the of the military it's been you know decapitation Um, you know, they killed a supreme
leader who was at home. I mean, it wasn't a great sort of intelligence coup. He was sitting at his desk in his home next to his office, which is part
of his office. I've seen the house. It's a It's, you know, it's very identifiable. We all know where it is.
It's on the edge of a forest in North Thran. It's a very simple dwelling, a simple building. uh and he was there uh
with um parts of his family all of whom were killed. Um I think it's fairly
evident that in a sense and and the supreme leader did say before this he
said listen I'm I'm partly crippled I do what I have left is my dignity and
that is something you've given to me and I am ready to sacrifice that um for um
Iran and for its people and so I think he did deliberately um accept at martyrdom. I mean, he'd been told to
move and he said, "No, other people have not got anywhere to go, so I'm staying put." So, he was so he was killed and it
created a fast storm amongst she across the region.
The she are quite a tight community. Yes, there are differences. Some are seveners, some
are s, etc. But it's created and many of the ayatalas of Marjah the people who
are emulated and you go to for advice have mandated um uh that it is
obligatory to um defend Iran. And they've mandated um and said they will
mandate um jihad, mandatory jihad against um America and Israel. um if the
attacks on the Maja um the the the leadership continue of of Shi. So um you
know this this this aspect to it has not succeeded. it's actually created. And one of the things
I I said to you earlier, there was a sort of change in in the atmosphere in Israel, but there's a change in Iran.
And what it's done is it's brought the Iranians together like they've never been since and the revolution. I
mean, they are fully behind the state in this war against America. Um and you
know every night uh it's Ramadan and every night after the uh uh if the evening feast they go out and on the
street and even if a a rocket arrives and in the crowds or by the crowds they
don't run they don't move they just stay there and they continue um to sing and
call for retribution against America. So it's really brought people together and given them resilience and steadfastness.
Yes, that it's hurting. I mean that's what's happening as to this other aspect. This is false. And this is
exactly what I saw in Lebanon in you know, the American Israeli propaganda was, "Oh, I mean, you know,
these, you know, flip-flopped, you know, footed um Hezbollah. I mean,
what chance of they against the biggest air force in the region and the most sophisticated army of Israel fighting
them? Of course, victory. I mean, they will just be obliterated."
And um of course what happened was very different. Yes, they did obliterate they
obliterated the residential area of Dah in Beirut. I went there, I saw it. I mean these were residential car blocks
that were they just knocked them down one after the other trying to create a a
sort of sense of despair and panic. Um and then you know and then we had all these statistics. Oh, we've done so many
raids. We've dropped so many bombs. I mean, we've obliterated Hezbollah. They hadn't. Um, and what happened? It wasn't
the war of days that the Israelis said it would take to do those. It was
days until and then Israel asked for a ceasefire, demanded a ceasefire. Um, and you know what were they hitting? I went down, I saw the tunnels and everything.
I went around the south. I mean, the tunnels, you know, they'd put dummies there and mockups of launchers and, you
know, they were they were striking when and what was very obvious to happen after a week. The Israelis announced
they they their data bank was over. They expended all their, you know, munitions on their data bank and they didn't have
anything else. But since the war was going on, what did they do? Well, they started knocking down civilian houses
and attacking houses um because we had to keep the statistics up. The war, you know, how many how many bombing raids
today, you know, general, how many raids yesterday, General, and so they've got to have something, but they're not
targeted. And what we haven't seen um in Iran, we haven't seen any sign that they
have been able to target the deeply buried sophisticated missiles. These ones that are dispersed right across you
know mountainous forested Iran um sides of Western Europe huge areas and these
are buried deeply. There are no missile launchers available there because they are fired from silos meters down.
They come straight up through their silo tube and into the atmosphere into their
target and there's an automatic system at meters that rotates and puts a
miss next missile into place and then the missile after that. And so there are none of these mobile miss these mobile
missile launchers which do exist. But these are for the sort of more simple ballistic missile uh uh um types which
are mostly used to sort of deplete air defenses either in the Gulf or or in Israel. And some of these ballistic
missiles actually most of the ballistic missiles that Israel is using at uh that Iran is using at this time uh they date
from production uh batch. I mean they are old and they are early and
that's what they're using. They haven't really they've begun to use a few of the newer missiles. Uh but that is mainly
being the the more sophisticated ones that we don't know what they all are going to be are being reserved um uh for
the attack on on Israel. So the whole thing is a phased process and we can detect where it is. The first phase was
to destroy or sort of bring out and deplete the air defenses of the Gulf States. Secondly,
to strike the American bases there, but primarily to destroy the radars to blind
the uh American um defensive system. And that's we know that's succeeded because
the Israelis are complaining bitterly that when once they had, you know, to warning of an incoming missile so they could get down to the shelters.
Now they're lucky to get one minute or none. And that's because the radars have gone and it's an integrated system. So
it isn't giving them um the warning. It also spells why much of the if you like
intercept capabilities of the Israelis um has deteriorated because without those radars and Hezbollah has been
actually also destroying some of the radars in the north of of Israel. So that nearly all of them are are gone.
And so um the American Air Force is doing this blind. And no, they do not
have air dominance. Um the the they keep talking about bombing Thran as if their
aircraft are flying anywhere they choose in um over Iran. But it it's not true.
Nearly all of these attacks are um standoff attacks from outside Iranian airspace. We saw a big performance about
B's flying over um uh um and bombing um if you like the coastline of Hormuz. Um
and you know the implication is they're free to fly over Iran. There's no problem. It's not true because we can
see from the photographs uh that they were loading up uh with just some missiles. Now, I'm not a military
person, but I know that these essentially are glide missiles. They're not bombs, bunker buster bombs, as they
pretend in the press. These are long you standoff attacks that you uh drop them
outside of the airspace and then they glide in and hit hit the target. So what's the state of the war? Well, as I said to you a little time ago, you know,
you can't say I mean the point about um uh if you like the American,
you know, visually very obvious attack is how effective it's been. Well, the answer is we don't know totally how effective it's been.
You can't, you know, knocking down residential buildings in Tehran is not effective. it's actually counterproductive probably. So we don't
know how effective it is and the censorship on in um in Israel is
absolutely you know years imprisonment for photographing
a missile from Iran arriving over it and years for um photographing it after
the event the effects of it. So we know very little about what it is. But that's why it was I think so important what I
said at the outset to this program that Netanyahu is saying we're not going to achieve our objectives. We're failing.
We're not going to collapse. The state isn't about to collapse. Very far from it. It's not going to collapse. We're not achieving our our our objectives.
and we're going to have to think rethink this whole uh idea of the you know the the great war um and try and redefine it
in in in a different in a different different way. So you know I'm sorry but that's a long answer to what sounds a
simple question. Who's winning? Um uh uh I think I would say in some it's
America's and Israel's to lose and Iran has just got to um survive it and stand
firm and and dominate um if you like in the economic
sphere and also to inflict sufficient punishment
on Israel in its estimation means that Israel will never again decide, you
know, that it that it's a good idea to launch another war uh on uh on Iran.
Yeah. No, I think all of that was very important, Alistister, and it was a big question that I asked you. So, I think you covered all of the points. Uh and
now I'm glad you brought that up. Uh to end uh what you were saying there,
Alistister, uh the economic sphere and dominating it. Well, the data is showing this in many ways. U since February
th, it is being reported that Iran has actually exported at least million barrels of oil. Some people have told me it's definitely more than that. Uh
earning at least billion or more uh despite oil prices soaring um and the straight of being closed. And this is
kind of the graph uh showing uh showing the price of oil. And uh what it doesn't mention here that particular
report uh is the importance of China uh China actually has uh purchased I believe most of uh Iran's exports at
this time and so I wanted to ask you given that there are reports about Russian intel helping with targeting uh
there's been a lot of reports back and forth about China's role but how have you made what have you made of Iran's response economically for itself to this
war and and how it relates to this bigger shift that uh I think some have minimized which is this large multipolar
shift in the world that is led by Russian China. Some have minimized it have have of course uh emphasized Israel's role in this war but it's
obvious that the United States has a big uh goal here of uh destroying Iran so it can essentially destroy this global
shift. But it seems like Iran in this realm has things pretty firmly under control as of right now and the US is
afraid it seems to bomb Iran's exports given what that would do to the oil markets. But your reaction to this and
how it fits in with this multipolar shift.
Um well I I had started a little earlier saying that the domination of these
seaways, these choke points and these corridors, naval corridors for energy
products um was going to change the whole Gulf. the Gulf has got, if it wants to have revenue, if it wants to
import food, we'll have to deal with Iran and accept Iran's domination of this area. It's going to be a big
geopolitical um change for the Gulf, degrees change from for the Gulf.
But the bigger picture which you allude to is very important too because it changes a bigger geopolitical um map. Um
you said about China. China um % of the oil passing through Homos um has
been um for delivered to to China. China is sending its tankers through Homos.
the Iranians allow their Chinese um tankers to pass um uh without incident.
Um however um America keeps talking about well you know they're going to impose sanctions or or close it or
something. Um, nonetheless, that % of HMO's um exports um is actually for
China because it's such a big energy consumer only about % of its total energy consumption. So, you know, even
if Hmuz was shut by the Americans taking some action, um the Chinese could live with that. It's not existential uh at
all. But meanwhile what um again as part of the sort of geopolitical flipping the
geopolitical map uh Iran is saying if you want to um pass through the hormuz
today all you have to do is make it clear that it was bought and paid for
with RMBI with Juan Chinese one and so that's how Pakistan managed to get its
tanker through India has been allowed to pass tankers through um and Pakistan
made a statement and convinced the Iranians that um their um their the
their cargo was transacted in Juan. So this is again nudging very firmly a a
bigger geopolitical shift if you like for the whole of Asia and for um the
world to see that if you you know if in this new era if you want to do business and you want to do business in in energy
well you have to shift and think about shifting to Juan um remember trade um if
you want to get a passage of your your your vessels through. So this is a really important element of the bigger
picture of moving you know in a different in a different era and different direction for um both for
China and away from the dollar. So dollar cargos are not accepted. Dollar
payments not accepted. Only Juan payments will get you through hormos. So this is an aspect that hasn't had much
attention probably because you know America is absolutely determined to keep its dollar
hedgemony for reasons that we can see and understand but nonetheless uh are
seen by the rest of the world as basically a form of coercion um to extract um concessions um from those
states either in terms of um giving money to the United States um or um else
uh making investments into the United States in terms of manufacturing industries.
Yeah, know those are great points and uh you know as we as we head to the end here, Alistister, I just wanted to ask uh we were talking about the Gulf States
before and you were talking about them being firmly in the US camp. It seems that the longer this war goes on though
that given that there's this shift happening in the world given that we've seen over the years uh a lot of hedging especially with Saudi Arabia um
normalizing with Iran etc. this war is kind of exposed I think that a lot of these Gulf states really don't have sovereignty and uh they are following US
dictats uh despite the massive damage that Iran has done to US assets there and therefore uh the economies of these
Gulf states. What do you make of the future of the region now that uh you
know as this thing goes on it's obviously going to have massive economic uh impacts on on these states and uh do
you foresee that that could then create a rupture? I'm even thinking, will they try to come together like they supposedly did before the strike started
and try to really yank on uh Trump's uh coattails and say, "Hey, can uh can you stop this thing? Can you actually just
make a deal so we it doesn't lead to our ruination?" What do you make of this?
Because I I'm seeing a very bleak future for the likes of the UAE,
even Saudi Arabia, Qatar. I mean, Qatar I don't think is is is pumping gas right now. I mean, it's a really bleak situation. So what's your uh what's your thoughts on this?
You didn't mention Bahrain, but Bahrain is in in a process of a color revolution, an outpost. It's, as you
know, to % she uh ruled by a Sunni monarch and a defense force that protects him, which is all Sunni. And
there's been um huge protests and uprising. I think what is shaking the
the Gulf um is the sort of idea that you know that this could ignite if you like
a different but a new sort of Arab spring because of you know they feel a
lack of legitimacy um in on the ground and so they are very concerned about it
but they have been so I think thorough thoroughly embedded into the western,
you know, economic AI investment paradigm that it's going to be hard for them to make a a
transition or to get out of it. And whether I, you know, it's quite conceivable that we'll see um a very
different um geography in the future in in the Gulf uh region. Um maybe some states will disappear or change.
I'm not going to predict how or what. I can't. But I think there's going to be a a a massive uh reaction to this. I mean,
you know, the whole lifestyle.
I remember going to see the the head of um um the Amir of Gata once and um while
we were waiting for the appointment, I sitting in his chief of staff's office and you know it was bizarre because it
was like sort of being on Wall Street. I mean all the Bloomberg terminals tracking you know every movement you
know red green what's going up where's energy what stocks are rising I mean it was like a hedge fund and many of them
have actually become sort of semi-hedge funds um and is it possible to continue in that sort of mode I I don't know I
think it quite doubtful um but it's going to as I say they have got existential
um issue facing them. Where do they stand in this war now? Are they going to stand uh with the United States as
United States escalates further against Iran or will they decide um that if they
want to continue to trade and earn revenue um that they have to go and talk about a new relationship with Iran?
That's for us to wait and see.
And then finally, my last question to you, Alistister, is how since uh I believe this is the first time we've talked since the uh February th uh uh
beginning of this uh massive kinetic escalation by the US and Israel began.
Um how have you seen this affecting the other major flash points in the world,
the Ukraines, the of course the buildup toward China? How how has this war altered uh these uh I guess if you will
areas of interest for uh the US empire and of course uh those it drags along with it.
It depends a little bit on how this turns out. Um but it is already having a
a a really significant effect. I mean I think first of all uh the sense that I
mean you know that the word of the America of uh uh the American leadership
is not to be believed. Uh that you know after three deceptions in a row towards
Iran um with decapitations providing for decapitations and that there were more
than that. Um the lessons are about the dangers to one's own leadership. uh the
dangers of trying to do um negotiations uh with the United States. But more than
hat is I think the effect of of this two things of this of this language um
and also the effect um of uh you know that now increasingly people um as you
know the new truth social comes out uh overnight around the world people are laughing
laughing at them um increasingly because sometimes they're quite absurd and what they say is quite absurd. So I think
there's that sense too. But also I think the thing that is quite striking I mean uh the the language is really I mean uh
you know talks about the Iranians as being evil people who cut the heads off
babies and cut women in half and that they are you know um people um I mean
they you know that I mean this polarization that is implicit Is it in this language suggests that you know
that you're talking about um a sort of such an extreme dichotomy of evil and uh
subhuman people on the one hand um that um obliteration um becomes really the only the only
outcome and I think this is a bigger issue and we didn't touch on it but this
is something that is worrying a great number of Americans. I mean also about
where do we stand in in this? I mean are we in favor of obliterations
or or or are we not and is it really this war was it really in America's interest greater interest of Americans?
If not who who was behind it? who controlled it, what was the um what was
the mechanism, who's in charge and what interests were they pursuing.
So this is a debate that is opened and I think is going to come to the forefront and this is going to have big impact on
the elections. It's going to already having an impact. Um is Trump going to be able to recover? Are the Republican
party going to be able to recover um from this? I think that's quite quite doubtful that the Republicans can can
can um recover. I listened to a a an an American politician who was at their the
Republican meeting, Dural Club in um I think it's in Florida, uh one of Trump's
golf clubs, and they were having a a meeting to discuss where things are going in lead up to the midterms. And he
said, "Listen, I think most of them know that they're going to be drowned. uh some may hope to sort of stay afloat
till but most of them think they're going to get ground in the midterms. So
I think the unexpected element perhaps of this is I think it's going to induce
an introspection in the United States about you know what
is this if you like what is this unseen if you like a power structure uh that
takes us unairringly to war after war when it's clearly against our interests as expressed in the polls and in
everything that we do not want another war in the Middle East. So what is the power structure and who's behind it and
what is their ultimate interests in this in the structure? We've had war going from Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, all of
these wars. I mean was this all in American interest? is the financial benefits that seem to come
out of these wars in the general interests of Americans. I think this is they're demanding that, you know, we
have to try and get to the bottom of this and and we have to discuss it
amongst ourselves and decide where we stand.
Yeah, I think that's a great place uh to close, Alistar. I want to make sure that everybody knows to uh subscribe and follow uh conflicts forum substack which
is in the video description below. You can hit the like button too so more people know about uh both this conversation that we just had with
Alistair as well as the conflict for substack. You hit the and in addition to hitting the like button, there's many places to support the channel too in the
video description below. Patreon substack and much more. But Alistair uh any final words before we head out of here to the audience?
Uh not really no nothing further. No from from what I said I mean many things
are going to change I believe in this period. It's an inflection point uh for America as much as it is for the Middle
East and for China and Russia. Of course all sorts of messages. I mean, you can
imagine Russians are watching what's happened with Iran in their war as they continue their own war.
Yeah, definitely. Well, sir, we'll have to keep in touch. We're going to leave here together. We'll be in touch and we will be back again with more updates uh
here on the show. Until next time, I'll be on p.m. Eastern time tomorrow. I will announce uh all of that very soon.
Hit the like button before you go and I will see you all again tomorrow. Bye-bye.

[admin]

Seyed M. Marandi: U.S. Attacked World's Largest Gas Field & Iran Declares Economic War
Glenn Diesen
Mar 18, 2026

Seyed Mohammad Marandi argues that Iran has declared economic war after the US and Israel attacked South Pars, the world's largest gas field. Marandi is a professor at Tehran University and a former advisor to Iran's Nuclear Negotiation Team.



Transcript

[Glenn Diesen] Welcome back. We are joined today by Seyed M. Marandi, a professor at Tehran University and a former adviser to Iran's nuclear negotiation team, to discuss this new round of very dramatic escalations occurring in the war against Iran. So, thank you very much for coming back on.

[Seyed M. Marandi] Thank you, Glenn. It's always a great pleasure being on your show.

[Glenn Diesen] Well, as I as I said, there seems to be some very powerful round of escalation. First, we heard about this attack on the Busher uh nuclear power plant. Uh that is it didn't hit the the nuclear reactor, but uh well, close enough to create some concern about what could happen in such an attack in terms of nuclear contamination. We've seen further assassinations of Iranian leaders and uh also of course uh the most recent only yeah coming breaking news now over the past two hours it seems this attack on this um south Paris in Thran which is uh the largest natural gas field in the world. Uh I mean I guess Iran has many ways of retaliating. How are you assessing this situation and where do you see this heading? Well, there are a number of things. Uh one is that Iran has a very strong chokeold on Trump and the Trump regime and that is of course the straight of Hormos and the vulnerability of Saudi Arabia even as it exports uh oil uh through the Red Sea. Iran can block that with missiles and drones and it is doing that with regards to the Emirates and that portion of oil that it exports from outside the Persian Gulf. So this is a very difficult situation for Trump, excuse me. And as he admitted, he didn't think or his administration didn't think. It's not clear to me uh where the fault exactly lies. uh they didn't think that Iran was going to attack US assets in the Persian Gulf region or shut the trade of Hormos which I find extraordinary because you and I and many others I think knew quite well that such a thing would happen. We've been discussing this together for maybe a couple of years. So when this happened, Trump of course uh made many bold threats, he saw that they weren't working and he despite saying that Iran was obliterated again he called for the entire world to help him open the trade of hormones and everyone said no. So obviously Iran hasn't been obliterated. Iran's navy is almost the entire navy that is used for wartime is in tunnels and they will uh enter the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Oman and the Indian Ocean when the time comes. their speedboats with missiles and Iran's uh missile capabilities and drone capabilities are are endless. They haven't struck any of the underground bases. They've uh failed to do anything about Iran's production capabilities. So Trump is in a very difficult place. On the other hand, the Israeli regime wants escalation and uh from what I'm hearing in the operational control has shifted from the United States to the Israeli regime. And so it is the leading the war and they are the ones who chose the targets and the United States agreed to cooperate with it to strike these targets. So it may not make a huge difference, but it is significant. And um I think the Israeli regime probably and the United States maybe uh want to escalate to see how far Iran will go. That's one possibility. I think they'll soon find out find out that Iran is willing to go to the very end and it will fight to the finish. So this experiment is a foolish one. Some believe that the Israeli regime wants the total destruction of oil and gas assets in the Persian Gulf region and it's possible that Trump will go along with it. In any case, Iran is going to go uh up the escalation ladder if that is what the US Israeli coalition does. So I think ultimately the big issue is that the United States is stuck with the trade of Hormos and Iran really holds all the cards. Now the Israelis are assassinating people. They may continue to do so or have successes, but it's not going to change anything. Uh the Iranians have a very sophisticated constitution. They have a very sophisticated state. They have many experts and uh people who are acquainted well acquainted with uh matters of state. So if one person is martyed, someone else will replace him. It's a loss without a doubt. Dr. Li Jani I've never worked in government but uh um I encouraged him to go to China and ultimately went when he went he asked me to go with him and when he came back he asked me to take care of the China dossier for him. Uh so for a couple of years until he left parliament uh he was the speaker of parliament of course I was in charge of the dossier on his behalf as a volunteer. I didn't receive any uh salary for this. U but um he was an excellent man, very smart, very dedicated, very a very moral person and uh it's a major loss and I'm I'm I was very fond of him. He was a very polite, highly educated, but everyone can be replaced with someone else. And martyrdom itself boosts the morale of society. It awakens the society further. as we saw today on the streets during his funeral and the funeral of the victims of the US attack on Iran's naval ship that was unarmed and was participating in a naval ceremony in India. Uh so I don't see any uccess of major substance uh because obviously I you can't say an assassination is not an a success but it's not going to achieve the results that they're seeking and in a way it's actually going to have the reverse effect as we saw with the martrdom of it it really mobilized the nation in a way which I have never seen even during the s I have witnessed things in tan on personally and I have seen images and videos that I have never seen before anywhere. People on the streets, huge crowds. I was there on Friday and then the USI-Israeli coalition bomb the people demonstrating on the streets and murder a person. And you don't even hear about in the hear about it in the Western media, but no one ran away. You may have seen I'm I'm sure you've seen images of it and many of your viewers may I'm sure have but I it's on my Twitter account. So people are steadfast and people have been mobilized and the United States has they they had a plan to uh carry out terror attacks last night and riots as they did a couple of months ago. It failed completely. people are on the streets throughout Tehran and throughout the country and they couldn't do anything. So on the whole I think the war is going very well for Iran. It's painful. They murdered many people, school children. They bombed hospitals today. They bombed key infrastructure. This is this is not something uh none of this is makes us happy. It's painful. Uh when they murdered Dr. large journey. They murdered all the neighbors of that in that apartment block. But the United States and Israeli regime have failed so far. Yeah. Well, what is he being um likely retaliation? because I watched a a spokesperson recently, well minutes ago or so uh given talk about how the energy infrastructure of those who participate in this will now I think he said burn to ashes. But uh we also see now some incoming strikes on the capital of Saudi Arabia. But I was also curious um what is the likelihood that Yemen could actually be be activated in terms of closing down the Red Sea as a response to this escalation because there's an important straighter of course that is the uh Babel Mandeb if I'm not slaughtering that name right and um yeah also narrow straight which can be used to sever access to the Red Sea. This is quite you know a critical uh maritime corridor as well because with the straight over moose disconnected this is essentially the only access to Saudi Arabia then all on this western coast. So how do you how do you do you see this as a possibility or how or what kind of a retaliations again I know the government doesn't tell you what they're going to do but what kind of retaliations do you think are realistic here? Well, the government has said that they will strike uh oil and gas facilities in the Emirates and Qatar and Saudi Arabia. I think by the time your viewers see this video, probably that retaliation will have taken place. We already hear that there was a strike on Qatar and on Saudi Arabia. Apparently this the strikes on Saudi Arabia targeted uh jet fuel depots for the US air force because the Saudis are deeply involved in this and uh it is increasingly becoming clear that the Saudis are encouraging the Americans to carry out these strikes against Iran. In the case of Yemen, they have said that they will enter the war and uh we'll have to see when that happens. Obviously it things depend on the escalation matter. Uh Iraq in in Iraq the resistance is striking at US assets but um it could do much more and the same is true with Iran. Iran can strike much harder. But Iran is moving up the escalation ladder based on US uh Israeli or what I would call the Epstein coalition's actions. So so for example today when they struck Iran's infrastructure the gas installations that was something that Iran had to respond to. Iran doesn't want to create a global economic meltdown. this war was imposed on Iran and as we saw Joe Kent uh resign and basically say what we've been saying all along that Iran was no threat and that it was the Israeli regime and the Zionist lobby that pushed the United States to war a war that's not in US interest at all uh so Iran is responding to aggression and it has shut the straight of hormones to put pressure on the United and its proxies and its allies. But if the United States moves to to destroy Iranian key installations, then Iran will do the same and then we will go definitely we will move to crisis mode with regards to the global economy because later on if there is an end in hostilities in Iran, Iran's demands demands are met. If there's no oil or gas uh be- because of the damage or destruction of the installations and if there are no tankers then what's the use. So the global economic crisis will be permanent or these it will last for many years that will be a global economic depression. So the United States began this aggression. The US regime, the Trump regime, the Israeli regime and its proxies in the region are all they are all complicit. The Iranians shut the trade of Hormos to put pressure. But if the United States starts attacking Iranian key installations, key in key infrastructure or the Israeli regime, it doesn't make a difference to us. Iran will respond in kind. And since these Arab regimes are host US bases and allow them to use their airspace and allow them to use their air bases and allow them to use their territory to fire missiles towards Iran like high missiles, they have no reason to complain whatsoever. Well, we see uh this US troops which have been sent to the region and some speak of putting boots on the ground. I'm not sure if that it's on Iranian soil or is it intended to open up the straight of Hermoose or you know is also not unrealistic uh that it could be used to invade Yemen perhaps to make sure that uh this straight uh well keeping the Red Sea accessible uh uh is kept open. Uh how are you assessing this? Do you think the that the US could go to this extent uh to I guess go in with uh troops uh on the ground? Well, Iraq and Yemen are not small countries with small populations. And Yemen today is much more powerful than it was a year ago when the United States waged the war against it and lost after weeks. And by the way, let's remember that during the seven-year long minutesgenocidal war carried out by the Saudis and the Emiratis against Yemen with the support of the entire region except for Iran in Turkey and and Katar also supported the genocide in Yemen until the Saudis and the Amiratis turned against turned against Katad and then the Eron and Katar tilted away from them. But the entire west and the region were all supporting the genocide in Yemen. And after years, it failed. What brought the Saudis to accept the ceasefire? When Yemen targeted Saudi oil installations and oil exports. So if the if Yemen could do that four years ago, I think it was, it could do it now. can end the Saudi oil exports that go to the Red Sea and it can also shut the Red Sea. So Yemen has these cap capabilities and I'm sure it's missile and drone capabilities are more of a threat today than they were back then to the US Navy. I don't see a a scenario where the United States can its troops a few I don't know troops can make any real difference. And this and it's even more implausible with regards to Iran. But let's say hypothetically that the Americans somehow with this small group takes the straight of homos. They've already under estimated Iran's missile and drone capabilities obviously and they say they keep saying they've destroyed them all and Iran keeps firing missiles and drones. But let's say that they take the stray of hormones and that the Iranian armed forces which have been preparing for such a scenario for years, they fail to dislodge them. What difference is it going to make? Ships have to come into the Persian Gulf. Iran, if anyone looks at the map, Iran owns one half of the Persian Gulf. They could strike missiles at ships from anywhere and then missiles that Iran fires are not fired from the coast. They're fired hundreds of kilometers in inside Iran. So they can take the straight of Hormos and Iran can still destroy whatever it wants, whether it's ships or whether it's installations as we're seeing right now. Or if they want to go all the way to the north of the Persian Gulf and take Park Island, it's a flat island. Then the Iranians can hammer them on that flat piece of land and they'll take large casualties, but still they're not going to open the straight of hormones for trade. There won't be any oil. The only thing that will happen is that through escalation, you're going to have more tankers destroyed and more oil and gas installations destroyed. And so ultimately when this ends and it will end at some point but with failure on be by the you know US failure and Israeli failure then there won't be the oil that they're seeking to bring back to the market and every day that goes by Glenn you have what million barrels a day that are not being sent to the market. So the the shortage is growing by the hour and they can manipulate the market for a few days or a couple of weeks, but then it's going to hit them very hard. And of course, it's not just oil, it's gas. And of course, it's not just gas, it's fertilizer and prochemicals. And it's imports and exports because the these Arab family dictatorships are are huge consumer markets. And the United States and the Europeans have huge assets in this region, trillions of dollars. They've invested all sorts of money in these consumer societies. The losses to the United States to the rise in the price of energy, the shortage of energy or fertilizer, the the the destruction of their assets, a lot of the weapons that the US sells, they sell it to these countries and they these countries don't even know how to use them because they don't even have competent military forces. that doesn't there's only like people how are they going to use their all those jets that they bought those jets jets are basically bribes and also the kickbacks and the commissions by western senators and their business partners and the royal family and all that and the same is true with other countries so the losses to the United States are multi-dimensional uh and of course the petro dollar takes a hit So, as things stand, I don't see the United States finding a way out. They're only digging themselves further in the hole. And the world is going to blame them. I mean, what Joe Kent says is recognized across the world. So, people are going to blame blame Zionism and Trump for for the misery that they are beginning to impose on the international community. Yeah. the resignation letter of um Joe Kent. It's been read tens of millions of times apparently online now. So it's uh um yeah it's quite extraordinary that essentially the the second in commander uh would be the one who resigns and put this out there. So it does show that um the narrative of this war is well also not going well. Uh but I think what you referred as panic is probably correct because this began. It looked like Trump genuinely thought this would be uh another Venezuela quick in and out. attack and by the end of the weekend before the stock markets open then have your uh you know your victory speech uh prepared but uh but the government didn't fall and the army didn't collapse and so I I can there seems to be uncertainty in terms of what what other cards can be played and uh we'll see reports that Trump was quite upset that uh there are no military ways to open up the straight over moose but it does seem that uh as one often us in this kind of situation that is to uh prepare a proxy to fight on your behalf that this has been attempted but the Gulf states appear to have resisted so far at least that is they don't want to go get into a direct fight with Iran Azarban looked for a moment like it could take the more direct role but then they turned the Kurds which were armed by the CIA then also apparently got very concerned I'm not sure if they were ever ready to go or if they just you know didn't want bet on the losing horse. But uh but even the allies of the US, NATO and in East Asia, they didn't want to join in on this mission to I'm not sure how they would do it, but the yeah the convoy to try to open up the straight of moose. So but the last efforts we see now is uh some we read uh in the American media some pressure on Syria to enter Lebanon that is to take you know in this chaos to assist Israelis that is Jolani's government uh to help Israel to essentially get rid of Hezbollah in Lebanon. uh how do you how how do you see this scenario or the likelihood of this being initiated and even succeeding then?

[Seyed M. Marandi] Well, first Glenn I want to say something, and then there are a number of things we have to unpack here. One is that the people in the west, in the mainstream media, there are always two types. One says, "Let's go and take them out." And the other says, "They're bad, but this is not a good idea." In my opinion, they're all the same. And the reason why I say this is that, I won't name names, but one of your guests who came on a few days ago, he was that sort of person. He said something dishonest about Masa. He said that she was murdered. There's no evidence of that. The footage is out. The medical report clearly indicates that she had a condition. She was not beaten. There's no evidence of that. But they keep saying that Iran killed tens of thousands of people. These are all lies. And those people who repeat those lies are making the case for war. And so they're complicit in war, and they have blood on their hands. Every single one of them. And it's unforgivable. I'm glad that you invite all sorts of people. I'm just trying to make this point, because I want people to know that those in the United States, in the mainstream -- it's the same with Maduro. Those who say Maduro is a bad guy, but no, don't take him out, they have blood on their hands, because instead of saying, "NO, WE ARE THE BAD GUYS for bombing boats in the Caribbean, WE ARE THE BAD GUYS for murdering people and kidnapping the president." Instead, yhey say, "Yes, he's a bad guy." NO, YOU'RE THE BAD GUYS. And so these people who repeat these lies, I think they just want to be relevant in the mainstream, or some of these Leftists, European leftists -- in the global south, they're not like that at all-- but in Europe, they're very hostile towards Iran. They have this old, irrational hatred, because the only revolutionary movement for some of these people can be them. And so obviously the Islamic revolution of Iran is "medieval, and backward, and evil, and the mullas, you know, they're crazy, and they suppress women," and all that nonsense that we've been hearing for years. But ever since the beginning of the war, we've seen millions of people on the streets, every night. As we speak, Glenn, there are huge crowds in Tehran. Huge crowds across the city. And we all saw the footage of men and women standing their ground under missiles [blowing up right behind them]. That's not a people that hate the regime. That's not a people willing to die under air strikes, who stand their ground. That's not a people who believe that Masa amini was battered to death, and that the mullah regime is killing women all the time, and that they're slaughtering tens of thousands of people. Iranians know better what goes on in their country than these people who live in Europe, and the United States, and basically lie about Iran because it serves their interest.

But in any case, the point I'm making is that for me, those who say, "Maduro is evil, the Cuban regime is evil, but let's not do this," NO. THEY ARE EVIL. And so are their governments. And if they have intellectual honesty, they'll point the finger at their own governments and leave Cuba alone, leave Venezuela alone, leave Hezbollah alone, leave Iran alone. It's none of their business.

But to get back to the question, I think that what we are witnessing is a completely new situation. And that is that for the first time the Empire has failed, not only at regime change, it's failed to even take a country, because we've always always been told that the United States lost the war in in Iraq; it lost the war in Afghanistan; it lost the war in Vietnam. But in the case of Iran, it hasn't even been able to take and occupy parts of the country. After weeks of battle, and with a huge coalition, the whole collective west is behind it, and all these regional regimes are with them too. Azerbaijan, the Persian Gulf, Turkey under Erdogan, Awax jets fly over Turkish airspace to gather intelligence against Iran, and US bases as well, they're all working against Iran. But they have failed. Why? Because the Iranian people support the Islamic Republic of Iran today, yesterday, two weeks ago, and two months ago. Today, they're more mobilized. They're more united, and that small minority that was on the streets rioting, who the West glorifies, and exaggerates, and lies about, a lot of them have changed their positions, because they now see that the West, which they thought was democratic and who they supported, you know, basically they're kids. They were like first year university students, second year university students, like high school kids. But now they see that they're bombing schools, and bombing hospitals, and their whole world view has been shattered. I'm not saying all of them, but many of them them are on the streets like everyone else, and I have my own anecdotal examples of them. So that's why the Republic of Azarbaijan would never dare attack Iran. I mean, look at the images of people on the streets in Tabriz, in Aril, in Urum, in Marand, another Azeri city. They would take over the Republic of Azarbaijan in a week. The Iranians would overthrow the regime. And the same is true with these Kurdish terrorist groups. Because the Iranians have warned the semi-autonomous government in Erbil, the Kurdish government in northern Iraq, that if they allow these people, these terrorists, because that's what these these groups are, to attack us on behalf of their masters, the CIA and MOSSAD, they're owned by Western and Israeli intelligence agencies, then we will destroy you, and so will the Iraqi resistance, and then there will no longer be a autonomous Kurdish government in northern Iraq. So they stood back down. _____, if he tries to do anything against Lebanon, first of all he's shown his true colors to everyone, unless they're utterly ignorant sectarian people, who are wahhabi, and salafi types, who close their eyes to truth and just support these terrorists, even though they know that the Americans were controlling them, and the Israelis were allied to them.

Everyone knows who [Abu Mohammed] al-Golani is now. He's a US asset. If he attacks Lebanon, Iraqi resistance will move into Syria, and Iran will destroy him and his commanders with drones and missiles. We don't need our long range drones to do drone and missile strikes on Israel with. We can do it with shorter range missiles and drones, different classes of missiles and drones, just like what we're doing in the Persian Gulf. So I don't think he's going to do that either. So ultimately the United States has failed to use terrorists inside Iran. Maybe they try something in the days and weeks ahead, but they will fail. Even if one person is killed, they'll make a big deal about it, and the Western media will say all sorts of nonsense, Fox News, and all that, but they'll fail. And the same is true in all these other arenas that we've been talking about.

So the United States is stuck. So all they can do is assassinate. Which just creates more determination. That makes our Iranian leaders more angry, and adamant that we must defeat the enemy. Because [the Iranian leaders] are friends. These are national figures. And when they kill them, people will seek revenge.

I just posted a woman who was struck by a missile nearby, and was in panic, and then another missile hit her. You know, people see these these clips in Iran, and their rage grows, their anger grows.

The other day I was at the funeral, the huge crowd for Dr. Liy and the naval officers. And I'm not a government official. I'm just at the University. But people see me on online and rarely I'm on Iranian television, and they come up to me and say, "You know, the leaders should protect themselves more." They say they're too courageous.

You saw on Friday at the national FUQs day, the rally for supporting Palestine, the Dr. Gilani was on the streets, and the president was on the streets. The head of the judiciary, the head the head of the judiciary, was doing an interview when a missile hit. He didn't even blink. The foreign minister was there, and so on. And of course the US secretary of war called them all "rats hiding in their holes." But people saw the reality. They know who the real cowards are.

So people were telling me, you know, they thought I have access or could tell them to not come out on the streets, tell them not to come to the funeral. They were demanding that the leaders not attend the funeral. Literally. Glenn, literally, hundreds of people said this in one way or another. I was just walking through the crowds, and people were stopping me the whole time.

So this is a nation that's united. So they can assassinate, but it's not going to help. It's going to make things worse for them. They can bomb Iranian infrastructure, critical infrastructure, but Iran is going to hit back, and that's only going to complicate matters further. Because as I said, if the United States meets Iran's demands, then the Strait of Hormuz can be opened. And after a period of time, the flow of oil and gas, and everything else, petrochemicals, can go back to normal. But if they destroy the key infrastructure in Iran, then Iran is going to destroy key infrastructures in those regimes where the Americans have their bases, and the problem is going to become very long term. So that's not a solution either.

So Trump is stuck in a hole, and Netanyahu put him there. The Zionist put him there. The Zionist Netanyahu, and the Epstein class, has created a global crisis.

[Glenn Diesen] Well, it's interesting what you said about the political Left, and all this. I made that point earlier as well, and not here, but that after the cold war, especially, you saw neoconservatives on the Right who aspire for security through hegemony, or Empire, they more or less engaged in this unholy alliance with the political Left as well, under the idea that this is a liberal hegemony, that by dominating, it will elevate the role of democracy and human rights around the world. So all conflicts are now just framed as humanitarian. And then suddenly you see these Leftists advocating for peace on the Left, and saying they can't support these authoritarians. So this is why Maduro, the Russians, Iran, they're all regimes who are delegitimized, and they can never be supported. But, as you suggest, once these leaders are denounced, then they already essentially, indirectly, made the case for war. And even when you sell people on the Left that it's about liberating women, then suddenly, they're on board with war. You also see this with the Ukraine war on the political Left, the very people who traditionally are the first ones to take up the cause for peace. They're not talking about diplomacy. They're not talking about dialogue, mutual understanding, or peace. They're talking about how do we send more weapons? How do we close down the Opponent's media. This is essentially what they're talking about. So the whole concept of peace has been perverted to a large extent. I like Jeffrey Sachs for this reason. He went to speak at the UN Security Council, and he opened up -- this was before the attack on Venezuela -- he opened up and said, "I'm not here to discuss the character of the Venezuelan government. That's beside the point. We're talking about what the US is planning to do. So just put that whole thing aside. Because once you say you support this, and condemn that, then you make the point for war." He just swept this whole thing aside.  

But yeah, I wanted to ask about something you said. You mentioned that if the US meet the demands of Iran, and I did see the Iranian foreign minister who said that Iran does not want a ceasefire, but wants a political settlement, a peace settlement, peace is not the same as a ceasefire. And again we heard similar arguments coming from Russia as well. That a ceasefire's temporary pause allows the enemy to regroup, replenish, and get back to the fighting, but a peace settlement would address the underlying causes, and actually find a solution. So what is the solution? What what are the demands that America must meet? I mean, what is the opening position of Iran versus where do you see possible compromises coming in?

[Seyed M. Marandi] Well, first I was really laughing inside thinking about these people who talk about Iran, or Venezuela, and ask "Do you support the war?" AFor the first five minutes they have to badmouth Iran and say, "Well, Iran is really evil. They're really bad people. They're horrible. I don't condone anything, but I I don't support war, or Maduro being captured." When I look at Iran, then look at the west, I mean, it's Iran that's opposing genocide, and the West that supports the genocide. And the regional countries they're all US proxies. But I think that this is not just going to be about Iran. Iran has said that its allies in the region have to be included in any cessation of hostilities. Why do we oppose a ceasefire? Just as you said, we've done this before. We had a ceasefire, and they regrouped, and attacked us again. We were negotiating, they attacked us. We negotiated again, and they attacked us again. And doing a deal with Americans, especially under Trump, is just meaningless. Nothing that he says means anything. A piece of paper that he signs is just a worthless piece of paper. So the facts on the ground have to change. So first of all, it has to include Iran's allies across the region.

Second of all, the facts on the ground have to change. What do I mean by that? It means that the Persian Gulf must be structured. The security of the Persian Gulf must be structured in a way that Iran no longer feels threatened by the United States. These countries cannot be used as platforms to attack Iran! And if the Israeli regime attacks Iran, there have to be consequences. So there has to be change on the ground. Pieces of paper are worthless.  

And then there's the issue of reparations. Iran will demand reparations, and in the future, the security of the Persian Gulf will be different from the past. These Arab family dictatorships, if they last, they will have to deal with a new reality. And they will be severely weakened. They're already severely weakened. The middle east will never again be the Emirates that it was three weeks ago. That's gone. All those billionaires, they're not coming back, which is a good thing. I mean, if there were no billionaires, you know. Anyway, they won't be coming back. And the same is true with the rest of these tiny regimes in the region. So Iran is here to stay. And after almost 3 weeks, we've seen that the Americans are incapable of defeating Iran, and ultimately, Iran is prepared for a very, very long war. And as we speak, Iran is producing more missiles. I don't know if it's producing more drones, because it doesn't even have space for drones. All of its underground bases are full. They are more than prepared to go on for years. This is not a war that the United States can win. We fought Saddam Hussein for eight years ,and people in Iran are now prepared.

Before the war, everyone was concerned what would happen. Now that there's war, people say, "Let's do it. Let's finish it. Let's defeat them. We have to get this done." Everyone understands that a ceasefire is of no use. People on the streets know this because this didn't happen years ago. This was months ago. And both were unprovoked. In other words, people in Iran, just like people across the world, recognize that in the United States, it is Western mainstream media, especially Fox News, and Newsmax, whatever -- I just did an interview with one who was crazy -- but anyway, unless someone watches that sort of nonsense, everyone knows that negotiating with Trump is is useless. So the facts on the ground will have to change, so that Iran feels, and its allies feel, secure in the years ahead. The Israeli regime can't just bomb Lebanon whenever it wants to, despite having a ceasefire. They can't just kill people, Gazans, Palestinians in Gaza, every day, just because they feel like it. So the facts on the ground have to be inclusive.

And there have to be reparations. There may be other issues, and of course they can negotiate these issues in different ways, but ultimately Iran is not going to accept a situation where it can be attacked again in a few months.

[Glenn Diesen] Yeah, I just had a thought about what you said about the obligatory condemnation of the opponent, because I've been in many interviews and debates, and it almost always starts with the same question, which is, "Do you condemn Putin; do you condemn Iran; do you condemn Hamas; do you condemn Maduro; you know, this opening question, it's very clever though, because if one hesitates, then there's a false dichotomy. Either you align yourself with the moral posturing of the person doing the interview, or you're with the other side. And then if you fail to say yes to this opening question, which allows you through the gate as being, you know, legitimate, and now we can listen to you, if you fail to do this, then you're morally suspect. You're already compromised. You're now a Putinist, or a Ayatollah apologist, or whatever words one would use. Again, it's clever, because it forces people to be weeded out, so now we can't listen to you. Or you have to buy into the premise, and say essentially which side is the goody, and which is the baddie, who is legitimate, who is illegitimate, and also at times it indicates when the conflict starts. So no one would start an interview asking me, "Do you condemn the past decades of how the Israelis have treated the Palestinians; do you condemn US bombing of Tehran. You know, this is not how it's intended to go. It's always one way. And it's manipulative. But it's very effective. People have a hard time getting through that.

Just a final question, there was a spokesperson I think from the Iranian government, perhaps it was a foreign minister, I get things mixed up now, who said that there's no going back to the way things were in terms of the Strait of Hormuz. How do you interpret this? Will accessibility to the waterways be conditioned in the future, or what do you think was meant by this? Sorry, a lot of speculation.

[Seyed M. Marandi] No, no, I think I think you're right. I think the foreign minister said that. I think others said it as well. I don't think it was just him, but I do vaguely recall him saying it in an interview recently, but he's been doing a lot of interviews, and doing a pretty good job. Actually, some people say to me that he has a smirk, and apparently I'm known by some for my smirk, but they say he does it better than me. So, I should be jealous. I haven't watched many of his interviews. I've seen bits and pieces, because so many things are happening, and the internet connection isn't great. But from what I'm hearing, he's been doing a really good job. I think what he means is that there will be some sort of control by Iran, and there will probably be a financial element to it. Whether that will be a part of the compensation mechanism, or whether it will be something else, I don't know. But again, we're not going back to where we were before. These regimes in the Persian Gulf, they've harmed us for a very long time. When Saddam Hussein invaded Iran under Western pressure, they encouraged him. I mean, the Soviets also helped him, but the West pushed him to war. When he invaded these same regimes in the Persian Gulf, they funded the war. They gave him hundreds of billions of dollars then. I think maybe a billion dollars, which in today's dollars would be much more, and he was able to purchase chemical weapons from the Germans. And the Germans helped him build a huge chemical weapons stockpile capable of slaughtering so many Iranians. I mean, one of those really hypocritical regimes is the German regime, who has never apologized, never paid compensation. Once a MP, a number of German MPs, came to Iran, and they visited our university, and someone asked me to be in the session. And there was this woman from the Green Party, and she was bad mouthing Iran, and I said, "Excuse me, I'm a chemical weapons victim of Saddam Hussein. Will you apologize for what you've done to me?" And she couldn't say anything. And afterwards, two or three of the MPs came to me and said, "She's crazy; these people are crazy." I thought the Green Party was good. I didn't know European politics that well. So in any case, those chemical weapons' funding came from these countries. They supported Saddam Hussein. We forgave them after the war, and normalized when they began building bases. Those bases were used in the previous war against us to help the Israelis defend themselves, and the Americans to defend the Israeli regime. The radar systems help with their offensive actions against Iran. And of course, they were used in the US attack on Iran. So we have many grievances.

But after this war, Iran is not going to allow these regimes, these family dictatorships, if they remain in power, to behave like they did before. That's just not acceptable anymore. It won't happen.

And of course, Iran holds the cards, and ultimately the United States will have to leave. This cannot go on forever. And when they do leave, these regimes will have to recognize that they have to behave like ordinary countries, not with the arrogance like they did before, just because they had gas and oil wealth, and they were dictatorships, and American bases there. That's no longer going to be accepted.

[Glenn Diesen] I know things aren't easy over there in Tehran now. So,I do appreciate that you took all this time to speak with me. And yeah, thank you, and take care, and stay safe.

[Seyed M. Marandi] Thank you very much, Glenn. And I'm grateful for all the great work that you do.

[admin]

How Israel Convinced Trump to Wage War Against Iran (w/ Max Blumenthal) | The Chris Hedges Report
The Chris Hedges YouTube Channel
Mar 18, 2026 The Chris Hedges Report

Max Blumenthal reports that a psychological warfare campaign orchestrated by Zionist interests targeted Trump to drive him into war with Iran.



Transcript

The Israeli government mounted a sustained campaign to entice Donald Trump into a war with Iran. It assured Trump that once the supreme leader
Ayatollah Ali Hami was assassinated, the fragile edifice of the Iranian Islamic State would crumble and a new pro-Western government would replace it.
Part of this campaign also included manufactured plots to convince Trump that Iran sought to assassinate him. I
got him before he got me," Trump told a reporter when asked about his motives for authorizing the killing of the
Supreme Leader on February th. Joining me to discuss the campaign to convince Trump to go to war with Iran, something
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has unsuccessfully tried to get past administrations to do
for decades, is Max Blumenthal, the editor of The Gray Zone. Max is also the author of Republican Gomorrah, Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party:
The Management of Savagery and Goliath:
Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, a book that despite being nearly pages long, was so captivating and so well reported, I finished it in a day. So,
Max, let let's there's been long pressure on the Trump administration. in your article in the grrey zone uh you say this goes back to the very campaign
itself. Um explain how that worked. He was of course surrounded by uh
pro-Israel advisers both in his first term figures like Bolton and in his second term. Uh
but just lay out the the process. Uh and and of course he survived two assassination attempts which uh I didn't know it till I read your story.
Netanyahu immediately linked to Iran.
Well there there's the material political force that influenced Trump that Israel applied to influence Trump.
And then there is there is the psychological pressure which is uh more sophisticated was a very sophisticated
campaign that was uh I think it's more difficult for people to understand because Trump is a difficult figure to understand. I mean,
if you're a sensible person and you listen to what Donald Trump says now,
you may want to try to apply some sort of rational logic to what Donald Trump is saying. Perhaps he's he's playing uh,
you know, three-dimensional chess. Or maybe it's three-dimension or he may just actually be an extremely
stupid, feeble-minded individual who is orary and irrational. But let's say
you're Trump's enemy. It's less important than if you're Trump's friendmy in Israel and you need him to
fulfill your objectives because you have the lobby that can convince and
influence US policy makers to act against American interests in your interest.
But Donald Trump is an enig enigmatic figure, less uh stable and predictable than a Bill Clinton or even a Barack
Obama. However, Trump offers this massive opportunity because he's totally transactional.
And he is someone who entered politics essentially to make a profit. So the Israelis were working Trump through
their cutouts. many of the figures that came out of the mega group that was launched in the s
uh to support Benjamin Netanyahu's campaigns and various pro-Israel objectives internally inside the US who are like to billionaires.
Netanyahu had a handwritten list of billionaires that he drew up to support his campaign back in
Um so you had those the most important figure would have been Sheldon add succeeded by his wife his widow Miriam
add there are other figures like Paul Singer who was sort of a main more of a mainstream neoconservative Republican he
had a gay son so he was hostile to the Christian right but he liked the Republican party because he is a vulture
capitalist who wants to pay very low taxes. He backed the entire career of Marco Rubio alongside the ads and Singer
eventually got in with Trump when Trump made certain promises which are now coming to bear right now in Iran and the
West Bank and elsewhere. Singer is an Israel first guy. other smaller figures,
Ike Pearlmutter, Bernard Marcus, we know these names. And it's obvious, Trump doesn't even hide this, that they are
essentially bribing him through our corrupt campaign finance system to allow Israel to deacto annex the West Bank,
commit genocide in Gaza, punish the international criminal court for attempting to hold Israel's military and
political leadership to account for these crimes, uh, and everything else all the way up to war with Iran.
And then you had Donald Trump, the man who had to be manipulated. And I assume
the Mossad and other forces within Israeli intelligence were seeking to first decode the enigma
of Donald Trump's psychology and then to exploit it as they do with all of their targets.
whether they're targeting them for assassination or targeting them for an influence campaign. Donald Trump has
been targeted through this campaign of legal bribery and manipulation since his first campaign.
He spoke actually at the Sands Casino in I believe it was, when he first started to emerge as a candidate.
This is the casino owned by Sheldon add in Las Vegas for the Republican Jewish Coalition, which is a cipher for all the
money from the right-wing ludnick billionaires in the US, principle, principally ad money. And Trump said,
you know, you guys uh like to make deals. Most of you are real are in real estate. He's probably thinking about his buddy Steve Witoff. So, let's make a
deal with the Palestinians. What would be wrong with that? And what Trump said there was just so unacceptable that he
was denounced as an anti-semite by the RJC. Then he immediately started to change his tune.
I and and what what did he say? What were the magic words? The Iran we're getting ripped off by the Iran deal that
Barack Obama signed and we're giving the Iranians and the mullas hundreds of billions of dollars. This was of course a humongous lie. We were just unfreezing
money that had been uh stolen essentially held up in international banks through sanctions. And Trump hammered this message again and again
and it was like a ludnik bat signal to Aden and all the billionaires of the mega group that they could now support
him and suddenly he began to surge forward. He was uh making deals behind the scenes through his son-in-law Jared
Kushner who understood this world very well through his own family Charles Kushner. The Kushner Foundation was
supporting some of the most radical settlements in the West Bank, supporting exclusively right-wing ludnik oriented
activities. The Kushner family was close friends with Netanyahu when he was opposition leader in Likood.
minutesUh Netanyahu would come over to their house and young Jared would have to get out of his bed and sleep on the couch so Netanyahu could have a guest room.
Um you know I could go into the Kushner family for the next hour, but he was the fixer who helped ali align Donald Trump with this Zionist billionaire class.
Donald Trump enters office. Israel uh starts pushing Trump to first of all he rips up the Iran deal. So that was a major win.
He announces the Abraham Accords which is intended to encircle Iran with a Sunni alliance of family dictatorships
in the Gulf seated in the front row. The Ads and Jared Kushner.
It was all pretty clear what the agenda was. But Israel was making moves on the ground too.
to escalate so that Trump would be pushed to wage war. Gareth Porter uh
published a really important analysis with us at the Greyzone, a two-parter on how Netanyahu and Mike Pompeo, Christian
Zionist, uh subject of influence for not just the Israel lobby, but also the MEK,
exiled Iranian regime change group, uh when he was CIA director, Pompeo and Netanyahu basically teamed up to
pressure Trump to authorize retaliatory attacks because of access of supposed access of
resistance attacks on US bases inside Iraq. There was one key attack on the U a US base in I believe it was Baghdad.
It might have been Baghdad or Herbiel in and it turned out that no group
affiliated with Iran or the popular mobilization units had carried out that attack. It was in fact an ISIS attack.
ISIS, a group that was essenti had essentially been defeated. Anyone could claim ISIS raises questions about whether it was a
false flag. And it was with that attack Netanyahu and Pompeo both went to Trump and said, "You need to retaliate. And
the way to do it is we're going to take out Kasam Solommani,
the number two figure in the IRGC, the IRGC's leading figure, head of the Kuds force, responsible for all of this
terrorism against Americans, they claimed even though he had just worked with the US hand and glove to defeat ISIS. And we know that he's coming to
Baghdad and will be getting off a plane uh to commit acts of terror against Americans when in fact he was going to a
uh diplomatic to negotiate diplomatically with Saudi Arabia. Trump authorizes a drone strike to kill Solommani getting off the plane.
And it's the first time that Iran retaliates against the US with ballistic missiles. They attack the US al-Assad air base in Iraq.
They of course give advanced warning.
Iran was always careful to avoid escalating beyond a certain point.
However, the Israelis have scored this achieved a major objective not just militarily but psychologically because
they had set Donald Trump up in an escalation trap where he would not only
have to continue escalating against Iran every time it retaliated or face looking weak, which is another aspect of Trump's
character, his personality. He he always needs to save face and avoid looking weak. But also, Trump would now fear his
own assassination because he had just taken out the second most important figure in the Iranian leadership hierarchy.
And that helps us set the stage for Trump's comeback,
minuteshis comeback campaign, and the various assassination attempts he faced after enduring the whole Russia gate saga,
which was indeed a hoax that was intended to paint Donald Trump as a traitor. The former CIA director, John Brennan, someone who has been involved in assassinations all over the world,
oversaw the drone assassination program, calls Trump a traitor on national TV.
Trump's looking over that shoulder for John Brennan. The Democrats impeach Trump I in Congress over the Ukraine war.
He faces lawsuits, accusations from women that he sexually harassed them in the past. It's all coming at Donald
Trump so fast and he develops this fear of assassination and also this
determination to claw his way back to power to get revenge against all the people who sought to take him out. And
so for the Israelis now the psych psychology of Donald Trump is clear. We just need to convince him that Iran is
trying to kill him and he'll do what we want.
And of course that fear of assassination as you point out is uh wellfounded. He was nearly killed in Butler,
Pennsylvania uh in July of And then two months later uh there was uh another attemp
potential assassin arrested who was hiding in the shrubbery outside of Mara Lago in West Palm Beach. So, uh, Trump
was already primed for this, uh, since there had been two close calls. You
write, "The FBI manufactured a series of assassination plots, successfully convincing Trump that Iran was hunting
him on US soil with highly sophisticated teams of hitmen." Can you give us the
details and and I guess begin by talking about assfant a merchant. Yeah. Mant.
Yeah. And so anyone who watched your intro will hear you quote Donald Trump stating, "I got him before he got me."
Referring to Ayatollah Ali Hamee.
This it's not really in Iran's doctrine to assassinate a foreign leader and risk
war. they would easily get the US to it would easily trigger the US to attack them. But this is what Trump believes.
So why does he believe it? Who convinced him? And and what do we know? Well,
the first thing to know is is that as you said, Donald Trump's fears of assassination are wellounded.
And the the the main assassination attempt which nearly claimed Donald Trump's life in Butler, Pennsylvania on
July is not well understood and still shrouded in mystery. And it's
especially not well understood by people on the left because, you know, what do they care? Uh, you know, the right is
much more invested in this and trying to get to the truth. and right-wing members of Congress, Republican members of Congress, have gone as far as going down
going to Butler to try to get to the bottom of it. One of them, Klay Higgins,
went to Butler, I think two weeks after the assassination attempt, and he found that the body of Thomas Matthew Krooks,
the wouldbe assassin who missed Trump,
supposedly sliced his ear and missed his head by like an inch,
his body had been destroyed. It had actually been returned to his family.
There was no toxicology report uh that he could access. We later learned the toxicology report was was faulty.
But there are so many so many a um instances of obstruction around crooks.
Uh Christopher Ray, the FBI director at the time, said that Krooks had no social media history and was just this kind of mysterious lone wolf. It turned out he had an extensive social media history.
on YouTube, for example. He was a prolific commenter declaring his intention to wage civil war inside the ignite a civil
war by killing political leaders in the US. He explicitly uh called for the assassination of Ilhan Omar in one
comment on YouTube. Other YouTube users were flagging his comments, but nothing ever happened to him that we know of.
So there are real questions within within what was once was Donald Trump's support base which is now kind
of like collapsing about whether Thomas Matthew Krooks himself was recruited had been recruited by the
FBI at some point and that Trump's assassination was a manufactured plot gone wrong. And it's going to get even
eerier when we start to understand the details of this figure Mant who you pronounce his name merchant. I mean that
might be how it's pronounced. I think it's Merchant. It's spelled merchant. Um he's from Pakistan
and he entered the United States through Houston to visit family. He had
an Iranian wife and he had met in Iran on a pilgrimage in Carbala and this wound him up on a terrorist watch list,
a DHS watch list when he entered uh what is it? George HW Bush airport in Houston I think in February of
However,
DHS waves him through or Customs and Border Patrol waves him through after discovering his whole history of having
family in Iran on his phone, seeing the watch list, and they give him a special I mean, I don't know if you can call it a special visa, but it's a kind of visa
that enables law enforcement investigation and they basically decided to target him and manipulate him.
The question is,
were the Israelis alerting them in advance that he was coming? Had the Israelis wound him up on the watch list?
And was this a kind of operation conducted in tandem with the Israelis?
Mhant enters the country. He's a, you know, small-time businessman. He's trying to meet business partners. A man approaches him and says, "I want to help
you uh sell shirts and get into the garment industry here." That man is an FBI informant who is a former translator
for the US Army in Afghanistan. We don't know his real name. And he winds up
filming Mant in a hotel room declaring his intention to carry out an assassination of unnamed political
leadership using a person protest as a distraction with a woman who's handling reconnaissance and a sniper.
This is a guy who has no military history, no experience with any of this. And then he's told by the informant, uh,
okay, I'll I'll get I'll get all these people. All we need is $So like $for like this giant flash mob
style assassination extravaganza is absurd. And it turns out Mant didn't even have $to his name. So the FBI
informant leads him up and down the east coast to meet various individuals who are all FBI informants to collect the money and then he takes him, you know,
to say, "Okay, we're going to do this."
Mhank goes home to Houston. He's arrested on guess what date? June th,
hours before the Butler assassination attempt.
Um raising serious questions. So then after Butler,
Mant is visited in his cell by a team of FBI agents who want to know if he had
anything to do with the uh attempt to kill Trump and Butler. They determined that he hadn't. He had no idea about it.
But it raises further questions. And as one of them later told the Washington Post, if we had demonstrated that this Merchant guy had been sent by the IRGC,
it would have meant war. They would have had to have attacked Iran. And I just want to stop you there, Max, because as you know very well,
immediately after /
uh the FB this was kind of the motus operendi of the FBI where they would find these deadenders
and uh uh essentially suggest particular plots and supply them with the money and
minutesthe material to do it. I think in something like % of these cases where they had supposedly uncovered terrorist
cells they exactly like this they were essentially created by the FBI completely uh Trevor Arensson the
researcher in his book the terror factory found that something like over %
of terror busts during the Obama era by the FBI were manufactured plots
and uh the FBI agent who oversaw the Mersant case. Uh,
this is a detail that might be a little bit hazy for me. He's the same FBI agent
who oversaw the Detroit field office that spun out the phony Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot where Americans were
told that these right-wing militia men had plotted to kidnap the Democratic governor of Gretch and Whitmer. Turns out it was a controlled plot by the FBI.
Uh none of none of the uh defendants conceived the plot. The plot was completely conceived by paid FBI
informants, but they were all convicted anyway. And when did we learn about this horrifying right-wing terror plot? In
October of It was kind of like the October surprise that they dropped in order to uh, you know, further implicate
Donald Trump as an extremist. And, you know, I'm no fan of Trump, but it was pretty clearly a political ruse. So the
same guy was involved. He was found u in contempt of Congress I believe for li lying about um evidence. You know the
the FBI from throughout this entire saga has proven itself to be one of the most
corrupt institutions in American society and one of the most dangerous. So we go back also we should also mention that there was
another FBI manufactured plot to supposedly kill John Bolton. Yes.
Uh this was another plot that involved uh confidential informants and uh never amounted to anything.
it w, you know, even the even mainstream press concluded that there was never any point when the
the dupe who was supposedly going to assassinate Bolton, there was never any point uh when Bolton's life was in
danger. And Mike Pompeo subsequently claimed that he was targeted by the same IRGC run assassination network. But
there's nothing even in FBI or DOJ documents indicating that Pompeo was a target. It's just something Pompeo runs around and says constantly in order to
implicate Iran. So the IRGC operative who supposedly oversaw those plots is uh
named Moadam. This was the guy that Pete, whose assassination Pete Hegsth announced on like day three of the war
on Iran. And how did Pete Hegth know that Moadam had supposedly been killed?
The Israelis told him that they killed him. And so Hegathth was thanking the Israelis for
um taking out the IRGC operative who he believed had overseen all of these plots against Donald Trump. except they're not
even said to involve Donald Trump. It supposedly involved John Bolton. What's more,
this would be like assassinating,
I don't know, Pete Hegth because some American guy was in another country and
killed somebody. I mean, Moadam, whoever he is, is so far up the food chain, it's very doubtful that he had any command
and control over this uh supposed assassination.
So, in every case, there are either confidential informants or um paid w or
or witnesses who appear to have been confidential informants, but aren't named as such.
And there never was a case in which any individual who's accused of being
instrumentalized by Iran to take out Donald Trump ever came anywhere close.
Asaf Mant said, you know, I didn't even want to do it. I was just being I felt like I was being manipulated and pressured and I thought I had to do it
or my family back in Iran would be harmed. But he he said there's no way I was ever going to succeed. But then
there were um imaginary plots that were conceived as well. I mean, we're just talking about the the manufactured ones.
The most serious of these was when Donald Trump was told that there were IRGC operatives or IRGC
trained operatives in the United States who had shouldermounted like man pads that could take out Trump
force one. And this prompted Donald Trump to take decoy flights during the campaign on the private jet of his real
estate buddy, Steve Witkoff. Where did the FBI and uh I guess it was this came from the FBI. Where did they get that
from? It looks like they pulled it from the indictment of Ryan Roth, who was the second guy who attempted to assassinate
Donald Trump at Mara Lago in September He was the mentally troubled
drifter who was seen pointing an SK assault rifle toward the golf course
that Donald Trump was playing on with Steve Witco, by the way. And he was pursued and caught by Secret Service
agents. It turned out he has his own shady history. He was attempting to recruit internationals to fight in Ukraine, including uh you know,
Mujahedin from Afghanistan and including Iranians. And he had said, you know,
probably this was all bluster, but he had told some uh Iranian he was trying to recruit that he would give him like a
shouldermounted anti anti-aircraft. He would give him like a a rocket launcher. So, it looks
like the FBI just finessed the Roth indictment into an imaginary threat against Donald Trump to keep him afraid
of Iran on the campaign trail. But going back to the uh supposed Israeli
assassination of Moadam, the New York Times reported last week that they probably didn't even kill this figure.
I mean, this all came from Israeli intelligence. So this is the first time mainstream media has acknowledged that
Israeli intelligence was behind the,
you know, information that Donald Trump received that Iran was trying to kill him. So it raises questions about the Israeli intelligence role in in Asaf
Mant's case, about the Israeli intelligence role in convincing John Bolton that he was targeted, Mike Pompeo,
and the uh you know phony plot to take down Trump force one. And then finally,
Benjamin Netanyahu as is after Israel
launched an unprovoked assault on Iran in June the -day war, Netanyahu
wanted to guarantee that Donald Trump got involved and authorized US military action because Israel was not doing very
well at that point. Tel Aviv was getting hammered. Iran was retaliating after losing much of its IRGC command
tructure in a way I don't think Israel expected. So Netanyahu goes on prime time on Fox News, which is what Donald
Trump constantly has on his TV with Brett Bearer and he declares that Iran is behind two assassination plots, two
attempts on Donald Trump's life. And Brett Bearer was stunned. He was he said wait you know he it was a completely scripted interview and this was the only
follow-up question and he said what are you talking about uh where are you are do you have intelligence on this and Netanyahu then said oh yeah we have
intelligence but he was very careful to kind of cover up the fact that Israeli intelligence was manipulating Trump and
he said we get this through proxies through proxies. So, it was very clear that Israel was trying to convince
Donald Trump that Iran had was not only attempting to target him, but that they had sliced his ear with a bullet in
Butler, PA, and that Thomas Krooks was somehow an IRGC operative, this lone American boy who apparently was friendless, had never left the country.
And Donald Trump by this point believed it.
Do you think that was the prime primary motivation behind Trump's support of the war?
That's a great question.
I think Trump's Trump has uh has to answer for that.
He's not being asked these kinds of questions.
I don't know if he he he he often deflects from questions with insults or amusing stories or just um incoherent rhetoric.
But when this war is over, it will have dealt such a blow to US empire that there will be a lot to answer for and I
think his motives will come back into play. And I think there are motives that he's not able to address, such as his
own personal fear of the Israelis that Donald Trump wonders what would happen to him if he suddenly went off
script after accepting so much money from this mafiaike codery of billionaires adding Marcus etc.
What what does net what what does Donald Trump think about Charlie Kirk's assassination? Like who does he think did it?
Um I know people around Trump have serious questions about that one as well, but watching Charlie Kirk get shot
in the neck in the middle of a rally was not was uh probably not received
well by Trump. you'll, you know, he's he's he's not uh someone who wants to
sacrifice his legacy. He's there to make as much money as possible. He's worried about his grandchildren and sons being
targeted. His son, uh, Eric Trump actually stated on Fox News that he doesn't believe the official story around Charlie Kirk or around Butler,
PA.
So, there's a I think there's a fear factor as well.
I don't think Donald Trump likes Benjamin Netanyahu.
I don't think anybody likes Benjamin Netanyahu.
He I think he's afraid of him. I think he defers to him. And I think that Donald Trump is so feeble-minded and was also had so much hubris after Venezuela,
the success he saw there that he thought that he could achieve the trifecta of Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran in a few months and would be seen as this hero.
and he was the subject of so much manipulation financially and psychologically that his brain had been
rendered putty in the hands of the Israel lobby.
I mean, Max, at the same time, he was getting heat on the Epstein files. Yep.
Yeah. I mean, I helped coin the phrase Operation Epstein Fury.
That was my reply when the this the Department of War announced it was Operation Epic Fury. I just happened to
be up watching the war at that time and I responded Operation Epstein Fury and my tweet got likes. I'm sure someone else would have come up with it.
Many people understand that I think liberals tend to see this war as
a distraction from the Epstein files and the Epstein saga. There's like a running joke that Trump's going to have to release more Epstein files to distract from his failures in this war.
Most Democratic voters, according to a poll that was commissioned uh by the outlet Drop Site,
overwhelmingly believe that this war is a distraction from the Epstein files. I don't think so. I see it sort of as
synonymous with Donald Trump's proximity to Jeffrey Epstein and to the class of grifters,
elites, and oligarchs that existed within the transatlantic militant
Zionist network of Jeffrey Epstein. It's the so-called Epstein class. And this is and that's why you know you you'll even
see from hear from Iranians who are very familiar with American culture and western culture that they're at war with
the Epstein class or the Epstein army or the Axis of Epstein. It's just a symbol.
Epstein has become sort of a symbol for this decadent militaristic western elite that's incapable of negotiation or
humanity and worships at the altar of ba ba a molo which is why in Iranian
pro-Islamic Republic rallies when they want to show defiance against the US and Israel for attacking them they're
burning effiges of the pagan god Bale So there's this I I think there's just a
there's a greater symbolism to Epstein and the Epstein files that you know if we read it too literally just as if we
read Donald Trump too literally and try to see this in a sort of a linear sense we'll misunderstand the true meaning
whether it's the meaning to Donald Trump or the meaning to those who he's now placed under bombardment in Iran.
So it's the war is not going well for Israel or the United States. The we don't know how much punishment Israel is taking because of very heavy censorship.
Um but reading through the lines it's significant.
Uh Iran has no interest in negotiating. Uh
it's tried that route. It realizes these are not entities either the United States or Israel that they can appease
or negotiate with. Iran has the capacity to inflict tremendous economic damage.
It's already inflicting economic damage over the long term. Uh where do you see
it going and what do you expect the response to be? Well, just to try to
continue with the theme of this discussion about how Trump is being manipulated and moved, the reason that
the Iranians won't negotiate the I think the main reason is who's on the other side of the table or down the hallway since they negotiate through an
intermediary in Oman. It's Steve Witoff and Jared Kushner. And these are dedicated Zionist movement ideologues
and operatives who used negotiations to weaken Iran's ability to respond to an
Israeli decapitation strike. Steve Witoff is a guy who carries a pager gifted to him by Benjamin Netanyahu in
honor of the the pager operation. It's not.
He's someone who declared at a fundraiser for an Israeli group called United Hot Salah that his mother would
be so proud to see him speak immediately after the former head of the Mossad,
Yosi Cohen. Sorry, his mother would be so proud. His sons are also in very involved in the Zionist world and in Trump corruption networks.
Jared Kushner, I spoke about him earlier.
Kushner was not even supposed to be part of this administration. He simply emerged out of nowhere to lead negotiations and lead the board of
peace, which is a board of war designed to replace the UN with its first project
being to profit from the concentration camp, the biometrically controlled concentration camp of Gaza.
So those are the figures on the other line.
Iranian foreign minister Abbasaragi has said that he constantly is turning down Steve Witkov's attempts to negotiate
Steve Wickoff after the US launched this war with Israel, assassinating Iran's
supreme leader and all of its as many leaders as possible and killing many common people in the process. Steve Wickoff went on one of the Sunday shows
and he said that he that Iran refused to not only
end enrichment, which is a lie, but that Iran refused to give up its navy and to
give up its ballistic missile program and that they can't have a navy because it will allow them to close what Steve
Whit called the Gulf of Hormuz. He didn't even know what the straight of Hormuz was called. By saying that, it was very clear what was going on in
these negotiations. Steve Whit and Jared Kushner were putting forward Israeli terms in order to make sure that Iran's red lines were crossed at every point.
What country, what sovereign country is going to give up its own navy or give up a ballistic missile program that ex that
exists that's entirely legal under international law and which exists to deter these attacks that it continues to
receive. It's not going to happen. And we were told in the media that uh you know Iran's these negotiations are only focusing on Iran's nuclear weapons.
Well, Steve Wickoff went to Trump and said Iran can can uh produce nine to nuclear bombs within a week because they've reached %
minutesenrichment. And that got back to the Iranians and they said like this guy doesn't know anything. You can't produce a nuclear weapon at %. He He's an
idiot. So I mean you're dealing with ideologically motivated Zionists who are also complete
morons who can't even understand the basic technical parameters to even come to a deal. So
why why would Iran ever go back to the table? The only thing Iran can do at this point is impose
an end to the war through force. That's the that's the only language that the Trump administration has demonstrated that it understands.
There's another thing happening now because we're two weeks into the war or so. Iran is is showing that it can hit back.
Uh just today the fuel depot at Dubai International Airport was hit.
Uh Iran has been able to continue meeting the US and Israel up the escalation ladder and that's very shocking.
uh especially for someone like Donald Trump who has just been a target of manipulation and has no capacity for critical thought. And so what is Donald
Trump being told now now that the war is going badly by those who want to keep him in the war? There's now there's definitely a
faction in the Trump administration that would like to get out of this and that has buyer's remorse. I think Marco Rubio might even be part of that faction. you
know, he wants to focus on Cuba and his little Donro doctrine, Gusano project in the Western Hemisphere.
But those who want to keep Trump in the war are telling him that all of the images he's seeing of destruction at US
bases, for example, the US consulate in Baghdad. US embassy was evacuated this week. All of all Americans are being
evacuated from Iraq. What's going on there? They're getting hit by drones from Iran, from the uh resistance or outfits inside Iraq.
And uh Donald Trump doesn't believe it.
He's being told this is all AI and he's thrown he threw a tantrum yesterday on Truth Social and on uh Air
Force One, screaming at the press and declaring on Truth Social that um all all these videos of Iran's supposed
successes are AI and the whole media is falling for it. He uh screamed at a reporter and said that a major rally of
people in Thran after he assassinated Kame was fake. That that was an AI image. The New York Times has
verified the image. I don't need to verify the images. I can like see from all my acquaintances and sources in Iran
that this is happening like every night there. The whole society is mobilized and united against this assault or much
of the society. But Donald Trump doesn't believe any of it. And then Pete Hegsth,
this glowering sociopathic dry drunk character who is what should have been
fired over Signal Gate and man managed to stay relevant by bombing fishermen with drones off the coast of Venezuela.
Is now banning photographers from the Pentagon because he doesn't like the way they make him look. They make him look like he's weary and angry and under
pressure and he threw a temper tantrum at the Pentagon press corps just two days ago screaming at the press. You're
you're cheering for Donald Trump's failure. That's all you do is cheer for his failure. And he declared that he can't wait for David Ellison to take
over all of their networks. David Ellison being another Israeli billionaire asset who controls Paramount.
uh CBS and will soon control CNN,
Viacom, Tik Tok, and many other media assets.
So, they're they're in pan they're in panic mode. They're blaming the press.
This is not where they thought they were going to be. And Donald Trump is now being manipulated by being told that the entire failing war is a simulation and
that he's actually winning. But what are they doing? What are they hitting? Most of the targets that the US is hitting are civilian residential targets. Over
residential buildings have been damaged or destroyed according to the Iranian committee on the Red Cross.
And the military targets they hit primarily are you know Iran's navy naval ships that would not be useful in
closing the straight of Hormuz and Iran's air force which was outdated and you know might have been useful in a
regional conflict or to attack ISIS but would have never been able to compete with the US air force but they're not able to suppress Iran's shahed drones.
Iran had launched the th wave of Operation True Promise just yesterday with ballistic missiles
and so it's not it's not working and Iran is I think ready for a monthslong conflict that could fully exhaust
US empire what they're demanding is the withdrawal of US bases from the region that's what Donald Trump is fighting for
now he's not fighting for regime change there's not going to be regime change he's fighting to simply maintain the US presence in the region and to open the
straight of Hormuz uh facing global economic catastrophe.
The Europeans are not coming to his aid because how did he treat them with the tariffs? He threatened them over Greenland.
Uh the Europeans have more mind sweeping ships than the US. He needs them and they're not coming to his rescue at this point.
So, we may be seeing the unraveling of Donald Trump through this war and the Trump administration. And we're only like a year into that administration.
I mean, my fear my fear, Max, is that BB will reach for the nukes. Why? Why do you fear that?
Because I think Israel cannot sustain this kind of war of attrition.
I think that's a legitimate fear.
many uh I I think one of the bigger stories of the year is that Israel likely tested
a nuclear weapon in Deona in I think early February.
There was a massive earthquake near the secret nuclear facility in Deona that
was likely the result of a the test of a nuclear bomb. and Israel was sending a message but also preparing for the worst.
Yeah.
And I think we should consider the possibility that Donald Trump could detonate some form of nuclear weapon or
tactical nuclear weapon I if he's unable to simply walk away.
The Israelis do not want Donald Trump to walk away from this. He's being urged to walk away by many of his adviserss, but
the Israelis have all this leverage over him. So, we should be concerned about whether they'll drop a nuclear weapon.
And this is why it's completely rational and legitimate for Iran to develop a nuclear weapons program as a means of deterrence against these psychotic forces that are coming to destroy them.
Thanks, Max. Uh, and I want to thank uh, Victor, Sophia, uh, Max,
uh, and, uh, Thomas who produced the show. You can find me at chrisedges.substack.com.

[admin]

Iran 'BLOWS UP' Two Ships In Gulf Waters As IRGC Unleashes Hell On U.S. Allies From Qatar To Saudi
Times Of India
Mar 19, 2026 #raslaffan #qatar #iran

A ship was struck by an unknown projectile just 4 nautical miles off Ras Laffan Industrial City in Qatar — one of the world’s most critical energy hubs. The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations confirmed the strike, stating all crew members are safe, but the incident has raised alarm across global shipping lanes. The attack came just hours after reported Iranian missile strikes on Ras Laffan’s industrial facilities, where QatarEnergy confirmed “extensive damage” and fires. Qatar has called the strike a “brazen” threat to national security and expelled Iranian diplomats, signaling a sharp diplomatic fallout. This marks the second ship attack on March 19, after another vessel was hit near Khawr Fakkan, where a fire broke out onboard. The back-to-back incidents point to a dangerous expansion of the conflict into vital maritime routes.



Transcript

Two back-to-back attacks on ships near Iranian waters have sparked fresh maritime safety concerns in the Middle
East amid the straight hormos crisis. On March a ship came under attack right
at the doorstep of one of the world's most critical energy hubs when an unknown projectile slammed into the
vessel just four nautical miles off Raslafan Qatar's strategic industrial lifeline.
The United Kingdom maritime trade operations UK MTO confirmed the strike.
It said the vessel was hit near the Raslafan Industrial Hub. the site critical to global LNG supplies.
UK MTO statement said all crew members are reported to be safe and well.
Just hours earlier, Iranian missiles hit Ras Leafan Industrial City, an energy industry hub of Qatar. Raslafan is an
industrial area that contains the world's biggest liqufied natural gas processing facility.
Qatar's state oil giant Qatar Energy reported extensive damage and a fire at the facility. Iran launched missile
strikes targeting industrial facilities in the Ras Leafan zone. Now a ship struck in the same region. The Qatari
government described the Iranian attack as brazen and a direct threat to its national security and the stability of
the region. Qatar also ordered two Iranian diplomats, a military and a security atache and their staff to leave the country within hours.
This was the second attack on a ship on March Earlier, a projectile hit a ship near the UAE. The UK MTO said an
unknown projectile struck a vessel nautical miles east of Horfakhan in the UAE early on March The attack caused a fire on board the ship.
Ras Lafan in Qatar is home to one of the world's largest liqufied natural gas operations, a critical artery feeding
energy markets across continents. Any disruption here could send shock waves through global supply chains and spike
energy prices worldwide. It handles around % of global LNG supply. This
means a huge portion of the world's gas exports pass through this single location.
Ras Leafan processes gas from the north field which is the same reservoir as Iran's southpar gas field. Rasfan is not
just a plant. It's a major port and export hub with hundreds of LNG tankers passing through annually. Combined with
the nearby straight of Hormuz, it forms one of the most important energy choke points on Earth. A route vital for
global oil and gas flows. Raslfan is crucial because it is a global energy lifeline, a strategic war target and a trigger for worldwide economic shock.
[ __ ]
Oh my god.
The Middle East is on fire, literally and figuratively. Iran has entered total revenge mode following the assassination
of Ali Larajani, the nation's top security chief and one of the most powerful figures in Thrron's strategic leadership.
In a bold and unprecedented move, Iran has targeted Ross Leafon, a cuttery industrial city that houses the world's
largest LNG production and export facility. This attack is more than retaliation. It's a strategic statement,
sending shock waves through global energy markets and geopolitical circles alike.
Just hours earlier, Thrron witnessed a massive outpouring of grief and defiance. Thousands filled Revolution
Square and the surrounding central streets to mourn Larajani. Social media footage shows long lines of mourners
stretching for blocks, a testament to the immense public reverence for the fallen security chief. Chance of death
to America and death to Israel echoed through the city, signaling that grief has quickly transformed into a national
call for vengeance. Larajani's death was not just an assassination. It was an attack on the very nerve center of Iran's military and political apparatus.
Ali Larajani served as Iran's top national security official, a lynchpin in Iran's intelligence, military, and
political strategy. His role spanned negotiations, covert operations, and defense planning. His assassination by
USIsraeli forces is being seen inside Iran as a direct strike against the country's sovereignty and its regional
power. Iranian authorities have vowed that his killers will pay. The loss of Larajani has galvanized the nation,
creating a climate where every act of retaliation carries both symbolic and tactical weight.
In his first public response, Iran's newly appointed Supreme Leader Muchaba Kam denounced the assassination as a
criminal murder and a direct manifestation of the hatred of Iran's enemies. It is without a doubt the
assassination of such a figure attests to his importance and to the hatred that the enemies of Islam harbor toward him.
Kam said, "Every drop of spilled blood comes at a price and the criminal murderers of these martyrs will soon
have to pay it." He added, signaling Iran's uncompromising stance. Hours after the funeral, Iran struck Ross
Leafon, a city of immense strategic importance. Ross Lefon is the heart ofQatar's energy industry. Home to sprawling liqufied natural gas plants,
massive shipping terminals and critical infrastructure that supplies natural gas to Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.
sThe cuttery Ministry of Interior confirmed the fire, describing it as the result of Iranian targeting, though
details on the damage or casualties remain scarce. Even a minor disruption here sends ripples across global energy
markets affecting LNG supplies, oil and fertilizer production. Economists warned that the strike on Ross Leafon is a
stark reminder Iran is capable of hitting targets far beyond its borders,
turning strategic infrastructure into instruments of political messaging. The attack on Ross Leafon signals a
dangerous escalation. Iran is demonstrating that it can project power across the Gulf, threatening not just
Israel and US interests, but vital economic arteries of the world. Global energy prices are already sensitive and
disruptions at Ross Leafon, where hundreds of millions of tons of LNG are processed annually, could reverberate
from Europe to Asia. Economists warn of potential shortages, price spikes, and cascading effects across supply chains
for fuel, fertilizer, and aluminum. The stakes are enormous, and the message is unmistakable. Iran will not be
contained. Back in Thyron, the mood is a mixture of mourning and defiance. The funeral procession for Lauriani was not
just a tribute. It was a demonstration of national unity and resolve. Long lines of mourners filled the streets,
waving flags and chanting slogans aimed at the US and Israel. The visuals circulating on social media are stark. A
city alive with anger, grief, and determination. For Iran, this public display reinforces the narrative that
Lara Johnny's death will not go unanswered and that the nation stands ready to act.
The stakes are never been higher. With Ross Lefon struck, energy markets disrupted, and Tyrron united in outrage,
the risk of further escalation looms large. Analysts warned that Iran's retaliation may not stop at industrial
targets. It could extend to military installations, shipping lanes, and regional allies.
The assassination of Ali Larajani has shattered a fragile calm, turning mourning into action, grief into
retaliation, and a localized strike into a potential regional crisis. The world watches as fires rage in Ros Leafon and
the streets of Thrron swell with mourners. Aliarajani's death is more than a loss. It is a spark igniting vengeance, strategy, and confrontation.
Iran's message is unflinching. Every drop of spilled blood carries a price.
The question now is how far this retaliation will reach and how high the cost will rise. The flames of conflict
have been lit, and the Middle East and the world cannot look away.

[admin]

NATO Breaking Point: Trump Threatens Exit Over 21-Mile Chokepoint — Allies Have No Answer
Capital Breakdown
Mar 18, 2026 #NATOBreakingPoint #TrumpNATOExit #HormuzChokepoint

Trump just threatened to exit NATO over a twenty-one mile chokepoint — and the allies sitting across from him have no answer that resolves the core contradiction his ultimatum exposed. America is bearing the military and financial burden of protecting a maritime corridor that European economies depend on more than the American economy does, and the demand that allies either share that burden meaningfully or watch America walk away is the most direct challenge to NATO's foundational architecture since the alliance was constructed.

The twenty-one mile chokepoint is Hormuz — and the question Trump is forcing is not really about geography. It is about whether an alliance built around European territorial defense has any obligation, any capability, or any political will to contribute meaningfully to a conflict happening in waters that European supply chains depend on but European militaries were never configured to defend. The answer his allies are producing is silence, and silence is not a strategy when the American president is counting it as a no.

NATO at breaking point over Hormuz is the moment that reveals what the alliance actually is versus what its founding documents claimed it would be. A collective defense arrangement that collapses into national interest calculation the moment the conflict moves outside European geography is not collective defense. It is a subsidy — one that Trump has decided costs more politically than it returns strategically, and that the twenty-one mile chokepoint has made impossible to continue pretending is an equal partnership.

Allies having no answer is not a negotiating position. It is the confirmation that NATO's post-Cold War expansion produced an alliance that is wide in membership and shallow in capability — and the twenty-one mile chokepoint just exposed every mile of that shallowness simultaneously.



Transcript

Imagine waking up tomorrow and finding out that the alliance that has kept the Western world safe for years is gone. Not weakened, not restructured, gone.
That is not a hypothetical scenario anymore. That is the conversation happening in closed rooms in Washington, Brussels, London, and Berlin right now.
Because miles of water in the Persian Gulf just became the most dangerous question in modern geopolitical history.
And the answer to that question may determine whether the United States stays in NATO, whether global oil keeps flowing, and whether the world economy
survives what is already being called the most dangerous choke point crisis since the Second World War. Stay with me because before this script is over, you
are going to understand exactly why the next hours could change everything you thought you knew about global power.
Let us start at the beginning. Because to understand why Donald Trump is now threatening to walk away from the most powerful military alliance in human
history, you have to understand what the Strait of Hormuz actually is and why it matters more than any army, any missile system, or any nuclear threat currently
on the table. The Straight of Hormuz is a narrow ribbon of ocean sitting between Iran on one side and the United Arab Emirates and Oman on the other. At its narrowest point, it is just mi wide.
miles. That is shorter than the distance between some American suburban neighborhoods and their downtown centers. And yet through those miles
flows roughly % of the entire world's oil supply. Every single day, tankers carrying Saudi crude, Amirati gas,
Kuwaiti petroleum, Qatari liqufied natural gas, and Iraqi oil squeeze through that corridor before dispersing to Asia, Europe, and the Americas. If that corridor closes, even for hours,
the consequences are not just painful.
They are systemic. They are the kind of consequences that shut down factories in Germany, spike food prices in Egypt,
crash pension funds in Japan, and push gasoline in the United States past levels most Americans have never seen in their lifetimes. That is what is at
stake. That is the miles that Donald Trump just went to war over diplomatically speaking with his own allies. Now, here is where the story
gets complicated. Because the threat to the straight of Hormuz did not come from nowhere. It is the direct product of a military escalation that has been
building for weeks and has now reached a point of no return. Iran in response to devastating American and Israeli air strikes that have struck deep into its
military infrastructure and reportedly wounded or incapacitated its newly appointed Supreme Leader Moshaba Kame has done something that military
strategists around the world have been warning about for years. It has activated its full Hormuz playbook.
Iranian forces began deploying naval mines into the shipping lanes of the strait. Iranian missile batteries along the coastline were repositioned to target commercial tankers. Iranian
fastboats began harassment operations against vessels attempting to transit.
And Iranian drones, the same class of weapons that have demonstrated devastating accuracy across multiple theaters of war, began appearing over Gulf state infrastructure in numbers that shocked even experienced analysts.
The message from Tran was unmistakable.
You struck us. You wounded our leadership. You bombed our military sites. Now we will make the entire world pay the price through its energy supply.
The American military response was immediate and overwhelming. United States aircraft dropped what the Pentagon confirmed were multiple lb
deep penetrator munitions. The kind of bunker busting weapons designed specifically to destroy hardened underground facilities onto Iranian missile positions along the Hormuz
coastline. Iranian mine laying vessels were reportedly destroyed by American naval forces attempting to prevent the mining operation from being
completed. The firepower on display was extraordinary. But here's the problem that no amount of American military might has been able to solve. The
Straight of Hormuz is not just a military problem. It is a geographic reality. And geography does not care about aircraft carriers or bunker buster
bombs. As long as Iran controls the northern coastline of that mile channel, as long as Iranian forces can fire from land, from sea, and from the
air, the perception of danger alone is enough to freeze global shipping. And that perception is already doing catastrophic damage. Within hours of the
escalation, the numbers coming out of global energy markets told a story that no political speech could fully capture. Gulf oil exports dropped by at least %
almost overnight. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait,
Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Iraq all saw their export operations disrupted simultaneously.
Tanker captains who had been preparing to transit the strait began diverting their routes, adding thousands of miles and days of delay to their journeys,
costs that get passed directly to every consumer at the end of the supply chain.
Brent crude, the international benchmark for oil pricing, surged by more than %
in a single trading session. Analysts who had been cautiously discussing whether oil might reach or $per barrel were suddenly talking about
And then Iran made its most audacious statement of the entire crisis. Iranian officials warned
publicly that oil could reach $per barrel if the conflict continued. $
That number is not just an energy statistic. That number, if it materializes, represents a fundamental restructuring of the global economy. It
means recession in Europe. It means stagflation in the United States. It means food price explosions across the developing world, where fuel costs are directly tied to how food is grown,
transported, and distributed. The United Nations World Food Program issued its own stark warning, noting that % of global ura and sulfur exports, both
essential for agricultural fertilizer production, transit the straight of Hormuz. A prolonged closure does not just mean expensive gasoline. It means
the global food supply chain begins to fracture. While the air strikes were devastating, what Iran did to the civilian infrastructure of its Gulf
neighbors in the days that followed will change the entire conversation about what kind of war this actually is. And we will get to that in just a moment.
But first, let us talk about what was happening inside Iran itself during this period because the internal situation is as dramatic and consequential as anything happening on the battlefield.
When American and Israeli strikes hit Iranian territory, one of the targets was the compound where Mojava Kame, the son of the late Supreme Leader Ali
Kamani and the man widely believed to be the chosen successor who was elevated to the position of supreme leader in the chaos of recent months was believed to
be located. The intelligence that followed was the kind that stops briefing rooms cold. Reports indicated that Mtaba Kam was wounded. Defense
Secretary Hegsth, in unusually direct language for an American official,
described him as wounded and likely disfigured. When President Trump was asked directly whether Iran's Supreme Leader was alive or dead, he gave an
answer that sent shock waves through diplomatic circles around the world. He said, and these are his reported words, "We do not know if he is dead or not."
Think about what it means for the president of the United States to publicly say he does not know whether the Supreme Leader of Iran is alive. It
means that American intelligence is operating under genuine uncertainty. It means the Iranian state apparatus has been so disrupted that even its most
basic leadership functions cannot be confirmed. And it means that whatever decisions are being made inside Tran right now, they may be coming from a system that is simultaneously under
military attack in political turmoil and operating without full knowledge of the condition of its own top leader. In the days following the strikes, Iranian
state television broadcast only a still photo of Mustaba Kam alongside a written statement read aloud by an anchor. No live video, no audio recording in his
voice. No proof of life in any conventional sense. That silence spoke louder than any missile launch. Into that power vacuum, Iranian hardliners
made a calculation that will define this conflict for years to come. Unable to match American military power in a direct confrontation, unable to stop
Israeli air strikes with its degraded air defense systems, Iran turned its attention to what it could reach, what it could hurt, and what would make the rest of the world feel the consequences
of this war, even if they had not chosen a side. The Gulf States became the target, and the results were swift,
shocking, and deeply consequential for the global economy in ways that even experienced analysts were not fully prepared for. Within a compressed time
frame that stunned intelligence agencies, Iranian linked drones began appearing over Gulf State infrastructure. The most dramatic and economically significant of these
incidents involved Dubai International Airport, which shut down flight operations after a drone struck a fuel tank in the vicinity of the facility and
ignited a fire. Dubai International Airport is not just any airport. It is the busiest international airport on the planet by passenger traffic. The
disruption of operations there sent ripple effects through global aviation networks immediately. Connecting flights were cancelled. Cargo shipments were rrooed. The message was clear and
deliberate. Iran was telling the Gulf states and through them the entire world. That proximity to American power comes with a price tag. The economic
disruption was not accidental. It was the strategy. Meanwhile, Iran did not limit its retaliation to the Gulf States alone. The missile exchanges with Israel
continued. And on the morning of March th, reports confirmed that two Israeli civilians in Ramat Ghan, a city adjacent to Tel Aviv, were killed by shrapnel
from an Iranian ballistic missile that had partially penetrated Israeli air defenses. The death of civilians in a country that has one of the most
sophisticated air defense networks ever built sent a sobering message about the limits of even the best military technology when an adversary is willing
to fire enough missiles to overwhelm the system through sheer volume. Israel's Iron Dome, its aero interceptor systems,
and American Patriot batteries were all in operation. And yet, the missiles kept coming. The human cost was real. But equally real was the psychological cost.
The sense that no defensive system is perfect. No civilian population is fully safe. R and that this conflict has moved well beyond the stage where any single
military action is going to bring it to a conclusion. Now, we arrive at the moment that has sent shock waves not through the Middle East, but through the heart of the Western Alliance itself.
Because while all of this was unfolding,
while oil prices were surging, while Gulf airports were shutting down, while Iran was threatening to make the Straight of Hormuz a permanent no-go
zone for global shipping, the United States government looked at its NATO allies and asked a simple question. Are you with us? And the answer it received
was complicated, evasive, and in Donald Trump's interpretation, unacceptable.
The specific question was whether NATO allies would commit military assets to a coalition mission to keep the straight of Hormuz open by force. naval escorts for tankers, mine clearing operations,
air cover for commercial shipping, the kind of coordinated multilateral response that in theory an alliance of the world's most powerful military
nations should be able to mount quickly and decisively. The answer from key European NATO members was not an enthusiastic yes. It was a series of
carefully worded statements about the need for diplomatic solutions, about not wanting to escalate, about the importance of international law and multilateral frameworks, about
consulting parliaments and reviewing mandates. In plain language, they hesitated. And Donald Trump, who has never disguised his belief that European
NATO members are strategic freewriters who benefit from American military protection while contributing too little and asking too much, turn that
hesitation into a confrontation. His response, delivered with the directness that defines his public communication style, was to tell his European allies
that their failure to commit to the Hormuz mission was a very foolish mistake. And then he went further. He raised the possibility of reconsidering American participation in NATO itself.
Not restructuring, not reforming,
reconsidering. The word landed in Brussels like a bomb going off in slow motion. Because every European defense ministry, every NATO planner, every
foreign minister in the alliance understood exactly what that word meant in the context of a sitting American president who has questioned the value of collective defense throughout his
political career. It meant that the alliance that has been the cornerstone of Western security since The alliance that was built on the principle
that an attack on one is an attack on all was now being conditioned on a military question about a -m stretch of water in the Persian Gulf. NATO
allies had no clean answer. Any commitment to the Hormuz mission risks direct military confrontation with Iran,
which is something most European governments are desperately trying to avoid given their own energy dependencies and their own domestic political pressures. But refusing to
commit risks the most consequential rupture in the Western Alliance since its founding. It is a trap with no obvious exit. The pressure is building
with every passing hour. What makes this moment so historically significant is that it reveals something that strategists have been quietly discussing
for years. The fundamental tension at the heart of NATO has never fully gone away. The alliance works when threats are geographically clear, when the enemy
is obvious, and when the political will of all members align. It worked against the Soviet Union because the threat was existential and unmistakable. It has
struggled with every scenario that does not fit that clean template. A crisis in the Persian Gulf driven by a complex web of American Israeli military action and
Iranian retaliation is exactly the kind of scenario where European and American strategic interests diverge. Europe gets a significant portion of its energy from
Gulf sources. European economies are more immediately vulnerable to an oil price spike than the American economy,
which has become substantially more energy independent through shale production. European publics are deeply skeptical of military interventionism after two decades of difficult
experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq. And European governments, particularly in Germany and France, have spent years trying to maintain diplomatic channels
with Iran precisely to avoid this kind of confrontation. For them, joining an Americanled military operation in the Straight of Hormuz is not just
strategically complicated. It is politically toxic at home. But the American argument is equally coherent from Washington's perspective. The
United States has been carrying a disproportionate share of the global security burden for decades. American taxpayers fund the largest and most
capable military on Earth. American forces are the ones conducting air strikes against Iranian military positions. American sailors are the ones
clearing Iranian mines from shipping lanes that European companies depend on to move their goods. If the straight of Hormuz closes permanently, European
economies suffer enormously. So why, the American argument goes, should the United States carry the military risk alone while European NATO members enjoy
the economic benefits of open sea lanes without contributing to keeping them open? It is a powerful argument and it is the argument that Trump has been
making in various forms throughout his political career. The crisis in the straight of Hormuz has simply given him the most concrete and urgent version of
it he has ever had. The global financial markets have been processing all of this in real time. And the picture they are drawing is deeply concerning. Beyond the
headline, oil price surge, the knock-on effects across interconnected global markets are accelerating in ways that go well beyond energy. Shipping insurance
rates for vessels transiting the Persian Gulf have reached levels that make many voyages economically unviable, even if the physical threat were manageable.
When insurers will not cover your tanker, the tanker does not move. When tankers do not move, supply chains break down. When supply chains break down,
manufacturers cannot get components,
retailers cannot get inventory, and consumers face shortages that have nothing to do with their own economic choices. The shipping cost disruption
alone, independent of the underlying oil price, is already feeding inflation signals in markets from London to Singapore. Stock markets in Europe
opened lower on the news of the escalation with energy stocks paradoxically rising while airline manufacturing and consumer discretionary
sectors all fell. In Asia, where energy import dependency is even higher than in Europe, the concern among policy makers
is acute. Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, three of the most economically important American allies in the Indoacific are particularly exposed to a
Gulf energy disruption because they import the overwhelming majority of their oil from that region. Their diplomatic messaging has been carefully calibrated, expressing concern about the
conflict while quietly urging all parties toward a negotiated solution because their economic survival depends on the strait staying open. Here's what nobody in Washington is saying loudly,
but what every analyst with access to the numbers understands. The longer this conflict continues, the more it becomes self- sustaining in ways that are very
difficult to reverse. Oil revenues that would normally flow to Gulf state governments are being disrupted. Those governments are being asked to support
American operations diplomatically while simultaneously watching their own infrastructure come under Iranian drone attack. The patience of Gulf states with
the entire situation has a limit. Saudi Arabia, which has spent years carefully managing its relationship with both the United States and Iran, is now being
forced to choose sides in a much more explicit and uncomfortable way than it has ever had to before. The UAE, which built Dubai into a global economic hub,
precisely by positioning itself as a neutral crossroads of international commerce, just watched its primary airport shut down because it is
perceived as being too close to American and Israeli interests. These are not comfortable positions for countries that have built their entire modern economic
model on stability, predictability, and being a safe place to do business. The deeper question, the one that nobody wants to ask out loud in polite
diplomatic company, is what a world without a functional straight of horm actually looks like in the medium and long term. The honest answer is that the
global energy system has no good alternative. There are pipelines that bypass the straight. There's the East West pipeline in Saudi Arabia. There are
limited overland routes, but none of them come close to matching the volume of oil and gas that currently moves through those miles of water every
single day. The math simply does not work. If the straight closes for weeks rather than days, the world would be looking at an energy shock that makes
the oil embargo look like a minor supply disruption. That embargo triggered by a regional Arab-Israeli conflict, caused recessions in Western
economies, ended the post-war economic boom in Europe and North America,
fundamentally changed how Americans thought about their relationship with energy, and led to a decade of stagflation that scarred a generation of
policy makers and economists. The disruption being contemplated today involves a larger share of global supply, a more interconnected global
economy, and supply chains that are already fragile from years of pandemic disruption and geopolitical friction. The compounding effects would be severe,
and they would reach into corners of the global economy that most people would not immediately connect to a conflict in the Persian Gulf. Meanwhile, back in Iran, the hardliners, who now
effectively control decision-making in the absence of confirmed leadership, are doing their own calculations. And those calculations are not irrational, even if
they are dangerous. Iran knows it cannot defeat the United States military in a direct conflict. It has always known this. The strategic logic of the Hormuse
threat has never been about winning a war. It has been about raising the cost of American action to a level that makes it politically unsustainable. If American military strikes lead to a
doubling of gasoline prices in the United States, if they lead to recession signals in European economies, if they fracture the Western Alliance by forcing
a confrontation between Washington and its NATO partners, then from Thran's perspective, the strikes have failed in their strategic objective, even if they
succeeded tactically. Iran does not need to defeat America on the battlefield. It needs to make the battlefield expensive enough that America's partners begin
asking whether the cost is worth it. The threat to open new fronts as described in the written statement attributed to Mojaba Kam and broadcast on Iranian
state television should be read in exactly this context. The references to other theaters where the enemy has little experience and is highly vulnerable. The explicit mentions of
healthy forces in Yemen, Hezbollah remnants in Lebanon and Iraqi militias are all part of a strategy of cost inflation. Every new front is another drain on American attention, resources,
and political will. Every drone that reaches a Gulf airport is a message to Gulf states that American protection has a price that America's partners may not
be willing to pay. The final piece of this puzzle, the revelation that this entire script has been building toward,
is actually not a military development at all. It is a political one, and it is the question that historians may one day identify as the hinge point of this
entire era of global affairs. If Donald Trump's threat to leave NATO is even partially credible, if American allies genuinely believe that the United States
might walk away from the Western Alliance over a disagreement about the Strait of Hormuz, then everything that has been true about global security for
years is suddenly in question. NATO exists because the United States chose to remain engaged in European security
after the Second World War. That choice was not inevitable. America has a long tradition of isolationism and every pillar of the current global order from
the dollar's status as the world's reserve currency to the network of American military bases that make global power projection possible to the trade
agreements and multilateral institutions that structure international commerce.
All of it rests on the foundation of American strategic commitment. If that commitment is conditional on a mile stretch of water, then it is conditional
on many other things as well. And every government in the world is now calculating what those conditions might be and whether they can afford to find
out. The stakes, in other words, are not just about Iran. They are not just about Israel. They are not just about oil prices or tanker routes or bunker
busting bombs over the Persian Gulf coastline. They are about the structure of the world that has existed since and whether that structure can survive a
moment when the country that built it decides the cost of maintaining it outweighs the benefits. That is the question hanging over every government,
every boardroom, and every household that depends on a stable and predictable global economy right now. And the answer is being written in real time. miles
at a time in the most dangerous stretch of water on

[admin]

Iran just hit biggest LPG plant in Qatar
Capital Breakdown
Mar 19, 2026 #QatarLPGStrike #IranQatar #QatarEnergy

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/iran-attack-damage-wipes-out-17-qatars-lng-capacity-three-five-years-qatarenergy-2026-03-19/
Exclusive: Iran attacks wipe out 17% of Qatar’s LNG capacity for up to five years, QatarEnergy CEO says
by Maha El Dahan, Andrew Mills and Yousef Saba
Reuters
March 19, 20267:38 AM MDT Updated March 20, 2026

DUBAI/DOHA, March 19 (Reuters) - Iranian attacks ‌have knocked out 17% of Qatar's liquefied natural gas (LNG) export capacity, causing an estimated $20 billion in lost annual revenue and threatening supplies to Europe and Asia, QatarEnergy's CEO and state minister for energy affairs told Reuters on Thursday.
Saad al-Kaabi said two of Qatar's 14 LNG trains and one of its two gas-to-liquids (GTL) facilities were damaged in ​the unprecedented strikes. The repairs will sideline 12.8 million tons per year of LNG for three to five years, he said ​in an interview.
"I never in my wildest dreams would have thought that Qatar would be - Qatar and the region - ⁠in such an attack, especially from a brotherly Muslim country in the month of Ramadan, attacking us in this way," Kaabi said.
Hours earlier ​Iran had aimed a series of attacks at Gulf oil and gas facilities after Israeli attacks on its own gas infrastructure.
State-owned QatarEnergy will have to ​declare force majeure on long-term contracts for up to five years for LNG supplies bound for Italy, Belgium, South Korea, and China due to the two damaged trains, Kaabi said.
"I mean, these are long-term contracts that we have to declare force majeure. We already declared, but that was a shorter term. Now it's whatever the period ​is," he said.

EXXONMOBIL IMPACT AND BYPRODUCTS

QatarEnergy had declared force majeure on its entire output of LNG, after earlier attacks on its Ras Laffan production ​hub, which came under fire again on Wednesday.
"For production to restart, first we need hostilities to cease," he said.
U.S. oil major ExxonMobil (XOM.N), opens new tab is a partner in ‌the damaged ⁠LNG facilities, while Shell (SHEL.L), opens new tab is a partner in the damaged GTL facility, which will take up to a year to repair.

Texas-based ExxonMobil holds a 34% stake in LNG train S4 and a 30% stake in train S6, Kaabi said.
Train S4 impacts supplies to Italy's Edison (EDNn.MI), opens new tab and EDFT in Belgium, while Train S6 impacts South Korea's KOGAS, EDFT and Shell in China.
The scale of the damage from the attacks has set the region back 10 ​to 20 years, he said.
"And of ​course, this is a safe ⁠haven for a lot of people, to have a safe place to stay and so on. And that image, I think, has been shaken."
The fallout extends well beyond LNG. Qatar's exports of condensate will drop by ​around 24%, while liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) will fall 13%. Helium output will fall 14%, and naphtha and ​sulphur will both drop ⁠by 6%.
Those losses have implications ranging from LPG used in restaurants in India to South Korea's chipmakers which use helium.
The damaged units cost approximately $26 billion to build, Kaabi said.
No work is currently taking place on Qatar's massive North Field expansion project, which could be delayed for more than a year, he ⁠said.
"If Israel ​attacked Iran, it's between Iran and Israel. It has nothing to do with us ​and the region," he said.
"And so now, in addition to that, I'm saying that everybody in the world, whether it's Israel, whether it's the U.S., whether it's any other country, ​everybody should stay away from oil and gas facilities."
Reporting by Maha El Dahan, Andrew Mills and Yousef Saba; editing by Louise Heavens and Jason Neely

Iran just struck Qatar's largest LPG plant — and the target selection tells you more about Iran's strategic priorities than any official statement could. Qatar is not a belligerent in this conflict. It is the world's largest LNG exporter, the host of the largest American air base in the Middle East, and the one Gulf state that has maintained functional relationships with both Washington and Tehran simultaneously. Striking its biggest LPG facility is Iran choosing to burn that neutrality down.

Qatar's LPG infrastructure is not just a Qatari asset. It is a global one — the processing backbone of the energy supply that European governments have been depending on since the Russia-Ukraine war forced a continental energy pivot toward Gulf LNG. A strike on Qatar's largest plant does not just disrupt Qatari revenues. It disrupts the energy security architecture that Europe rebuilt its winter survival strategy around, in the middle of a conflict that is already straining every alternative supply route simultaneously.

Striking Qatar also delivers a specific message to the United States — that Al Udeid Air Base, the forward headquarters of US Central Command operating from Qatari soil, is now surrounded by a conflict that the host nation is being forced into whether it chose to enter or not. Qatar cannot maintain neutrality with its largest energy facility burning and American military operations launching from its territory simultaneously.

Iran just removed the last neutral address in the Gulf — and with Qatar's LPG plant on fire, the fiction that any Gulf state can simultaneously host American forces and remain outside Iranian targeting has been conclusively, physically, and economically eliminated.

If this gave you real clarity on what striking Qatar's LPG plant means for the Gulf and global energy, hit Like, Subscribe for real time energy and geopolitical analysis, and Share this with anyone trying to understand why this single strike just ended Gulf neutrality permanently.



Transcript

Transcript
Imagine waking up tomorrow and the gas station near your house has no fuel. The grocery store shelves are half empty. Your heating bill has tripled overnight.
secondsYour stock portfolio has collapsed. And on the news, you see a massive fireball rising from the Persian Gulf. The exact place where % of the entire world's
secondsenergy supply comes from. That is not a movie. That is not a hypothetical. That is exactly what happened in the last hours. And before this video is over,
secondsyou are going to understand why what just happened in Qatar could be the single most consequential event of the st century. One that could reshape
secondsevery economy on Earth, redraw the map of the Middle East, and pull the entire world into a conflict nobody is truly ready for. Stay with me because the
secondsstory of how we got here is even more terrifying than the explosion itself. To understand what happened last night, we need to go back just a few weeks because
secondsnothing in geopolitics happens in a vacuum. Every explosion, every missile,
secondsevery diplomatic collapse has a chain of events behind it. And this chain, this particular chain, is one of the most dangerous sequences of events the world has seen since the Cuban missile crisis.
minute, secondsIt started on the th of February, when the United States and Israel launched a coordinated massive air campaign against Iran. The scale of those initial strikes was staggering.
minute, secondsHundreds of targets across Iran were hit simultaneously, command centers. And in the chaos of that first night, Supreme
minute, secondsLeader Ayatollah Ali Kam, who had ruled Iran with an iron fist for decades, was killed. The world held its breath
minute, secondsbecause everyone who studies geopolitics knew one thing with absolute certainty.
minute, secondsIran would not go quietly. Iran never goes quietly. Within hours, Thran began firing back. Hundreds of drones and
minute, secondsballistic missiles screamed across the night sky toward Israel, toward American military bases in Bahrain, in Kuwait, in Qatar, in Saudi Arabia, in Jordan, and
minute, secondsin the UAE. Iran had spent decades building one of the most sophisticated asymmetric warfare capabilities on the planet. Not to fight America tank for
minute, secondstank, jet for jet, but to make the cost of attacking Iran so unbearably high that no enemy could sustain it. And now that strategy was being executed in real
minutes, secondstime on a global stage with the entire world watching the straight of Hormuz,
minutes, secondsthat narrow choke point through which roughly a third of the world's seaborn oil flows was effectively choked.
minutes, secondsShipping companies refused to send their tankers through. Insurance premiums on Gulf shipping skyrocketed overnight then faster still. For the first two weeks,
minutes, secondsthe Gulf states tried to stay out of it.
minutes, secondsSaudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar. These are wealthy, sophisticated nations that had spent enormous political capital maintaining a delicate balance. They
minutes, secondshosted American military bases, yes, but they also maintained back channel communications with Tran. They had tried for years to avoid being directly
minutes, secondsdragged into an Iran conflict. They publicly condemned the strikes, called for deescalation, and hoped the storm would pass without consuming them. But
minutes, secondshope, as it turns out, is not a military strategy. And what Iran did next would change everything. Iran's revolutionary
minutes, secondsguard corps was watching calculating and they were watching something very specific the energy infrastructure of the Gulf because here is what tan
minutes, secondsunderstood that many in the west did not fully appreciate the real power of the Gulf states is not their military it is their energy and above all above
minutes, secondseverything Qatar's Ross Leafon industrial city the crown jewel of global energy infrastructure the single most strategically important piece of
minutes, secondsenergy real estate on the entire planet and Iran had it locked in its crosshairs. Now let us talk about what Ross Lafen actually is because without
minutes, secondsunderstanding its scale you cannot fully grasp the gravity of what happened last night. Ros Lafan industrial city sits
minutes, secondsabout km northeast of Doha right on the Persian Gulf coastline. It is not just a gas plant. It is an entire industrial universe. Refineries,
minutes, secondsliquefaction trains, petrochemical complexes, storage facilities, export terminals stretching across the horizon.
minutes, secondsIt is operated by Qatar Energy, the state-owned energy giant that is the backbone of Qatar's entire economy.
minutes, secondsQatar, a country of just million people, punches above its weight on the global stage for one reason only, Ross Laughen. From this single complex, Qatar exports liqufied natural gas to Europe,
minutes, secondsAsia, Japan, South Korea, and the United Kingdom, countries that depend on it to heat homes and power factories. Qatar is
minutes, secondsresponsible for approximately % of the entire world's LG exports. But before we get to the missile strike itself, and we will in detail, you need to understand
minutes, secondswhat triggered it. Because Iran did not just randomly decide to hit Ross Laughen, there was a specific provocation. A specific moment when the
minutes, secondsrules of this conflict changed completely. And understanding that moment is key to understanding where this war goes from here and what it
minutes, secondsmeans for your money, your economy, and potentially your future. On the th of March, Israel, in a move that shocked even many of its own allies, struck
minutes, secondsIran's Southpars gas field. Now, South Pars is not just any gas field. It is the world's largest natural gas reserve.
minutes, secondsIt sits in the Persian Gulf, and here is the critical geographic detail that makes this so explosive. It is shared between Iran and Qatar. The Iranian side
minutes, secondsis called South Pars. The Qatari side is called North Field. They are literally the same underground reservoir of gas divided by a maritime border on a map.
minutes, secondsWhen Israel struck South Pars, Iran's oil ministry reported that numerous facilities were damaged. Fires broke out. And Tehran was furious. Not just
minutes, secondsbecause of the economic damage, not just because of the military humiliation, but because for weeks the United States and Israel had deliberately avoided striking
minutes, secondsIranian energy infrastructure, precisely because they feared exactly what would happen next. That restraint was now gone, and Iran's response was swift,
minutes, secondscalculated, and devastating. Within hours of the Southpar strike, Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps issued a statement that sent shock waves through every government, every boardroom, and
minutes, secondsevery trading floor in the world. They named five specific facilities in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar, and declared
minutes, secondsthem direct and legitimate targets. They named Qar's Messia petrochemical complex, and they named Qatar's Razlafen refinery. Then they told every worker,
minutes, secondsevery employee, every civilian in and around those facilities, "Evacuate immediately." This was a countdown.
minutes, secondsGovernments scrambled. Emergency protocols were activated across the Gulf. Qatar's foreign ministry condemned the Israeli strike on South Pars as a
minutes, secondsdangerous and irresponsible step. The UAE condemned it, too. Even Qatar, which hosts the largest American air base in the Middle East at Aloud, was furious at
minutes, secondsIsrael for triggering this chain of events. Because Qatar understood exactly what came next and Qatar was right to be afraid. Late on the night of March th,
minutes, secondsIran launched its missile strike on Ros Leafon. Qatar's air defenses intercepted four of the incoming missiles, but one got through. One missile, a single
minutes, secondsballistic missile, struck the Raz Lafan industrial city, and the damage it caused was not minor. Qatar Energy itself described this results as
minutes, secondsextensive damage. Fires broke out across the facility. Emergency teams were deployed. The complex was plunged into crisis. And then in the early hours of
minutes, secondsMarch th, a second wave came. More projectiles, more fires. Qatar's Ministry of Interior said the fires were preliminarily brought under control, and that no casualties had been reported.
minutes, secondsBut the message from Tran was clear,
minutes, secondsunmistakable, and deliberately terrifying. Iran can hit anything in the Gulf, anywhere, at any time. Nothing can
minutes, secondsguarantee protection. Now, let us talk about what this actually means for the global economy. Because this is where the story stops being a geopolitical
minutes, secondsthriller and starts being deeply personally relevant to every single person watching this video. No matter where on earth you live, Qatar accounts
minutes, secondsfor about % of global LNG supply. But here is what that number actually means in practice. Europe, which has been desperately trying to reduce its
minutes, secondsdependence on Russian energy since the invasion of Ukraine, has become enormously reliant on Qatari LNG. The UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, they
minutes, secondsall import Qatari gas. It heats European homes. It powers European factories. It keeps electricity grids running through cold winters. Japan and South Korea, two of the world's largest importers of LG,
minutes, secondsdepend on Qatar for a critical portion of their energy needs. And now that supply has been disrupted, not gradually, not through a market mechanism, but suddenly, violently,
minutes, secondsthrough a missile strike on the world's single largest LG facility. The markets reacted instantly. Oil prices surged.
minutes, secondsWest Texas Intermediate climbed to nearly $a barrel. Brent crude hit $and kept rising, eventually crossing $per barrel. Europe's gas benchmark,
minutes, secondsthe Dutch TTF contract, jumped more than %. The UK's natural gas prices had already spiked approximately % in a single session earlier in the conflict.
minutes, secondsNow, with the missile strike on Roslafen confirmed, traders and analysts are scrambling to price in a scenario that was previously considered a worst case
minutes, secondstail risk. and which is now simply current reality. American LG exporters saw their stock prices surge because when the world's largest LG supplier is
minutes, secondsunder active military attack, the next largest suppliers become extraordinarily valuable overnight. That is how markets work. That is how war reshapes the
minutes, secondsglobal economy in real time. And this is just the energy market. The ripple effects extend far beyond oil and gas prices. Airlines have already begun
minutes, secondssuspending flights across the Middle East. British Airways extended its suspension of flights to Doha through the end of April. Regional airspace has been closed and reopened repeatedly,
minutes, secondscreating chaos for global aviation routes and stranding passengers. The shipping industry, already dealing with the near closure of the Strait of
minutes, secondsHormuz, is facing insurance premiums that have become almost unworkable.
minutes, secondsContainer ships, oil tankers, LG carriers, they all need insurance to operate. And when the risk of being struck by a missile in the Persian Gulf
minutes, secondsgoes from theoretical to very real, the cost of that insurance becomes almost prohibitive. Now, let us talk about the
minutes, secondsstraight of Hormuz because this narrow waterway is perhaps the single most strategically important body of water on the planet and it is currently
minutes, secondsfunctioning at a fraction of its normal capacity. The straight of Hormuz connects the Persian Gulf to the open ocean. Through this choke point flows
minutes, secondsapproximately a third of the world's seaborn oil, Saudi Arabian oil, Emirati oil, Kuwaiti oil, Qatari LNG. All of it
minutes, secondsmust pass through the straight of Hormuz to reach global markets. Iran has long held the threat of closing the straight as one of its most powerful strategic
minutes, secondscards. And now with the war in full swing, Tran has moved to at least partially execute that threat. Shipping traffic has slowed dramatically. The
minutes, secondssoft closure of the strait combined with the attack on Ross Lafen has created what energy analysts are calling an unprecedented disruption to global
minutes, secondsenergy flows. And here is the thing about unprecedented disruptions.
minutes, secondsMarkets, institutions, and supply chains are not built to handle them gracefully.
minutes, secondsOil prices at $per barrel are not just a number on a trading screen. They translate directly into higher fuel prices at every gas station. Higher fuel
minutes, secondsprices mean higher transportation costs for every good that moves by truck, by ship, or by air. Which is to say, nearly
minutes, secondseverything humanity consumes. Higher transportation costs mean higher prices at the grocery store. Higher prices for electronics, higher prices for
minutes, secondsconstruction materials, higher prices for medicine. Inflation, which central banks around the world spent years fighting to bring under control, is
minutes, secondsthreatening to reignite. Not because of domestic monetary policy failures, but because of a missile that struck a gas plant on the Persian Gulf. This is the
minutes, secondsterrifying interconnectedness of the modern global economy. A single military event in Qatar can increase the cost of living for families in London, Tokyo,
minutes, secondsKarach, and New York simultaneously. And then there is Russia. While the world's attention is fixed on the Persian Gulf,
minutes, secondsMoscow is quietly and very deliberately benefiting from the chaos. With Iranian strikes restricting oil flow through the straight of Hormuz, global markets are
minutes, secondsdesperately searching for alternative supplies. The US Treasury, in a move that raised eyebrows across the political spectrum, issued a -day
minutes, secondswaiver on certain sanctions imposed on Russian energy sales. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant called it a narrowly tailored short-term measure to promote
minutes, secondsstability in global energy markets. But analysts pointed out the obvious. Russia is reaping a financial windfall from a conflict it had no visible hand in
minutes, secondsstarting. Higher oil prices mean more revenue for the Kremlin. A distracted America means less pressure on Ukraine.
minutes, secondsA destabilized Gulf means weakened American influence on the world stage. Russia is not a participant in this war, but it is very much a beneficiary.
minutes, secondsBack in the Gulf, the political situation is deteriorating rapidly.
minutes, secondsSaudi Arabia hosted an emergency meeting of Arab and Islamic foreign ministers in Riyad. Saudi Arabia's own capital had been targeted by four ballistic
minutes, secondsmissiles, all intercepted. Saudi Aramco's Ross Tanura refinery was hit by a drone strike. The UAE reported dealing
minutes, secondswith ballistic missiles and drones in a single night. The UAE's Haban gas facility suspended operations after
minutes, secondsdebris from an intercepted missile landed inside the complex. These nations are absorbing strikes they did not invite from a conflict they did not
minutes, secondsstart and they are running out of patience. Saudi Arabia's foreign minister after the Riad meeting stated that the kingdom had reserved the right to take military actions against Iran if
minutes, secondsdeemed necessary. That statement measured in its wording but unmistakable in its meaning signals that the Gulf states are moving dangerously close to a
minutes, secondspoint of direct military response. And if that happens, the entire architecture of this conflict changes in ways that are very difficult to model and even
minutes, secondsmore dangerous to contemplate. Francis President Emanuel Mcronone spoke to both Qatar's Emir and President Trump following the Ross Lafen attack. His
minutes, secondsmessage was urgent and pointed. There must be an immediate moratorium on strikes targeting civilian infrastructure, energy facilities, water supplies. He did not say eventually. He
minutes, secondssaid immediately. That urgency reflects a growing understanding among European leaders that the economic consequences of this war are no longer staying
minutes, secondscontained to the Middle East. They are already arriving on European shores in the form of energy prices, market volatility, and the threat of a winter
minutes, secondsenergy shortage if this conflict continues. And then there is what Donald Trump said because Trump's response to the Ross Laughen attack was unexpected,
minutesblunt, and diplomatically explosive,
minutes, secondseven by his own standards. He posted on Truth Social that Israel's strike on South Par was done out of anger, and that the United States knew nothing
minutes, secondsabout it in advance. He said Qar was similarly unaware. He then addressed Thran directly with a threat that staggered markets and governments alike.
minutes, secondsIf Iran continues its attacks on Qar,
minutes, secondsthe United States will massively blow up Iran's Southpar gas field. Let that land for a moment. The president of the United States is threatening to destroy the world's largest natural gas reserve.
minutes, secondsThe economic consequences of that single action alone, if ever executed, would send energy prices to levels the modern global economy has simply never
minutes, secondsexperienced. It would not just hurt Iran, it would hurt everyone. Inside Iran, the picture is one of an establishment under extraordinary
minutes, secondspressure, but far from collapse. Iran has confirmed the deaths of multiple senior officials in rapid succession.
minutes, secondsIntelligence Minister Esmile Katib was killed in an Israeli air strike on the night of March th. Security Chief Ali Larajani was assassinated the day
minutes, secondsbefore. Passage commander Golresa Solmani was also killed. Larjani in particular was widely seen as a pragmatist, someone capable of finding
minutes, secondsnegotiated off-ramps when the pressure became unbearable. His death closes one of those windows permanently. Iran's remaining leadership facing existential
minutes, secondsmilitary pressure and the systematic elimination of its command structure has every strategic reason to escalate rather than retreat. Because from Thran's perspective, pulling back now
minutes, secondswould look like capitulation. And in the logic of the Iranian regime,
minutes, secondscapitulation has never been a survivable option. According to conflict tracking data, Iran had launched over documented air strikes since the war
minutes, secondsbegan, nearly of which were intercepted by Gulf air defense systems.
minutes, secondsThe United States and Israel had recorded over strikes on Iranian territory during the same period. Iran had fired over ballistic and naval
minutes, secondsmissiles and nearly drones since February th. The sheer volume of munitions being expended on both sides is staggering. Analysts have noted a
minutes, secondsdeclining rate of Iranian ballistic missile launches, pointing either to possible depletion of specific stockpiles or a deliberate strategy of rationing resources for a longer
minutes, secondscampaign. Either way, Iran is still hitting targets. It is still finding ways through the world's most advanced air defense networks, and it just hit the world's most important gas facility.
minutes, secondsSeth Jones, president of the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, described Iran's approach
minutes, secondsthis way. The Iranians established themselves decades ago as a regime capable of conducting asymmetric operations and they built their entire
minutes, secondsmilitary and governmental structure specifically to withstand significant external pressure. Iran was not caught off guard by a major military
minutes, secondsconfrontation. It spent years preparing for exactly this. Its missile program,
minutes, secondsits drone capabilities, its network of regional allies. All of it was designed with this conflict in mind. And the targeting of Gulf energy infrastructure
minutes, secondsis not accidental or random. It is deeply, deliberately strategic. Rob Gist Pinfold, a lecturer in defense studies at King's College London, offered this
minutes, secondsanalysis of Iran's Gulf campaign. Thrron knows exactly what it is doing. The Gulf States have less appetite for a prolonged fight because this is
minutes, secondsfundamentally not their war. Iran is calculating that they will want a ceasefire as quickly as possible and will apply pressure on the Trump administration accordingly. In other
minutes, secondswords, every missile that hits a Gulf energy facility is not just a military operation. It is a political pressure campaign conducted with ballistic
minutes, secondsweapons designed to force Washington toward the negotiating table. Every point that oil rises above $a barrel puts pressure on the American economy.
minutes, secondsEvery European ally calling about energy prices puts pressure on Washington.
minutes, secondsEvery suspended LG shipment, every shutdown gas facility, all of it is pressure on Washington to find an exit from a war becoming more costly by the
minutes, secondshour. And yet there is no ceasefire visible on the horizon tonight. The US and Israel are continuing their air campaign over Iran. Iran is continuing
minutes, secondsits retaliatory strikes across the Gulf and against Israel. Hezbollah and Lebanon has re-entered the conflict,
minutes, secondstrading strikes with Israel in what has become a parallel front in the same war.
minutes, secondsAn Iraqi armed group has claimed responsibility for dozens of drone strikes across Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Jordan. A drone struck near Australia's
minutes, secondsmilitary headquarters in the UAE. NATO intercepted Iranian missiles fired toward Turkey. The conflict is not widening in some theoretical predicted way. It is widening right now, today.
minutes, secondsHere's the scenario that keeps energy analysts, geopolitical strategists, and economic policy makers awake at night.
minutes, secondsOil prices at $per barrel are painful but manageable. Oil prices at $per barrel would trigger a global
minutes, secondsrecession. If the straight of Hormuz were to be formally completely closed,
minutes, secondsif Iran moved from its current soft restriction to a declared naval blockade backed by mines and missiles, the immediate spike in energy prices would
minutes, secondsbe unlike anything the modern global economy has ever experienced or prepared for. Qatar's energy minister warned earlier this month that if the war
minutes, secondscontinues, Gulf energy producers may be forced to halt all exports and declare force majour. Force majour means contracts that simply cannot be honored.
minutes, secondLNG that does not arrive, factories across Europe and Asia that cannot get the gas they need to operate, heating systems in winter that run dry, food
minutes, secondssupply chains that collapse because transportation costs become completely unmanageable. The World Food Program and multiple economic analysts have warned
minutes, secondswith increasing urgency that this conflict is driving long-term increases not just in energy prices, but in food prices. Because food requires energy to
minutes, secondsproduce, process, transport, and refrigerate. A sustained energy shock does not stay contained. It bleeds into every sector simultaneously. That is
minutes, secondswhat economists mean when they describe a cascading crisis. Multiple interconnected systems failing at once. Financial, energy, food, political.
minutes, secondsRight now, the world is watching the early stages of conditions that could produce exactly that outcome. So, where does this go from here? There are
minutes, secondsseveral possible trajectories and all of them matter enormously. In the first scenario, back channel negotiations,
minutes, secondspossibly mediated by Oman, which has historically played this role, or another neutral party, succeed in finding a ceasefire framework. Both
minutes, secondssides pull back. Energy infrastructure is declared off limits by mutual agreement. The world begins the slow,
minutes, secondspainful process of assessing damage and rebuilding. Oil prices fall. Markets stabilize. The worst is avoided. In the
minutes, secondssecond scenario, the conflict continues at its current intensity, painful and destabilizing, but contained enough that global systems do not completely break
minutes, secondsdown. A grinding, expensive war that lasts weeks or months before sheer exhaustion creates space for negotiation. In the third scenario, the
minutes, secondsconflict escalates further. Saudi Arabia retaliates militarily against Iran. The Straight of Hormuz is formally closed.
minutes, secondsOil prices hit $per barrel or higher. A global recession sets in and the world finds itself in a situation
minutes, secondswithout a clear historical precedent for how to navigate an exit. Nobody knows which path the world is on tonight. The variables are too many. The actors too
minutes, secondsnumerous. The calculations too fast moving for any single government to fully master. But what we know with absolute certainty right now is that a
minutesmissile hit the world's most important energy facility. That the global economy is already absorbing the pain. That the governments most directly affected are
minutes, secondsrunning out of strategic patience. and that the decisions made in the next hours in Washington, in Tehran, in Tel
minutes, secondsAviv, in Riyad, in Doha will determine whether this crisis finds an off-ramp before it becomes something the world will be recovering from for a
minutes, secondsgeneration. The world has been in moments like this before. Moments of extraordinary danger where the choices of a small number of individuals determine the fate of hundreds of
minutes, secondsmillions. Sometimes those individuals found wisdom at the edge of the abyss.
minutes, secondsThe Cuban missile crisis ended with a back channel agreement neither side could fully acknowledge. Sometimes the wisdom did not come in time. The critical question hanging over the Persian Gulf tonight remains simple,
minutes, secondsterrifying, and deeply unanswered. Which kind of moment in history is this one?
minutes, secondsWhat happened at Ross Laughen is not just a new story to be processed and filed away. It is the clearest, most economically consequential warning the
minutes, secondsworld has received in a generation. The rules of engagement have changed. The safety of global energy infrastructure can no longer be assumed. And the
minutes, secondsconsequences of decisions being made right now will be felt in living rooms,
minutes, secondskitchens, gas stations, and grocery stores in every corner of the planet.
minutes, secondsThat is not hyperbole. That is the exact world we woke up to this morning. And now you know.

[admin]

Trump freaks out as US General refuses orders after Iran hit F-35 jets over Tehran
OPTM
Mar 19, 2026



TRANSCRIPT

It has finally happened. The unthinkable, the thing that Washington insiders whispered about behind closed doors but never dared say out loud, has
secondsnow exploded into the open. A full-blown mutiny is brewing within the highest echelons of the American military, and
secondsit is aimed directly at Donald Trump. We are witnessing an unprecedented rift between the White House and the Pentagon as senior army generals are outright
secondsrefusing to follow orders. Top counterterrorism official Joe Kent announced he is resigning as a director
secondsof the National Counterterrorism Center in a post.
secondsHis resignation letter read, "Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation and it's clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel."
secondsKent resigned on Tuesday and when he resigned, he said he disagreed with the administration's handling of the war.
secondsThis isn't a disagreement over policy or a memo of concern. This is a direct challenge to the commander-in-chief's authority in the middle of a catastrophic war. The breaking point,
minute, secondTrump's reckless, ill-conceived drive to plunge America into a ground war with Iran. After weeks of air strikes that have done little but inflame the region,
minute, secondsthe president wanted to double down. He wanted troops on the ground. He wanted to seize Iranian islands in the Persian Gulf. And according to sources inside
minute, secondsthe Department of War, the generals looked him in the eye and said, "No, we are getting reports of a near total breakdown of the chain of command. It's
minute, secondsnot just about ground troops refusing to deploy. It's even worse at sea.
minute, secondsCommanders of American warships are refusing to sail their vessels into the straight of Hormuz or anywhere near the Iranian coastline. And why? Because they
minute, secondsare terrified. They have seen the intelligence. They know that the Iranian military has developed underwater drone technology that is essentially
minute, secondsinvisible, silent, and absolutely lethal. The Pentagon brass has looked at what happened to the radar systems
minute, secondscompletely destroyed by Iranian strikes and realized that their multi-billion dollar ships are sitting ducks. They are
minutes, secondsnot willing to sacrifice American lives and the entire Pacific fleet for a war that serves no American interest. This
minutes, secondsis the level of fear and respect that Iran's asymmetrical warfare has instilled in the most powerful military
minutes, secondson Earth. These generals warned Trump before he launched this folly. They sat in the situation room and told him flat
minutes, secondsout that bombing Iran would not be a quick, clean victory. They told him there is no such thing as a surgical
minutes, secondsstrike against a nation with this much depth and this much strategic patience.
minutes, secondsThey told him that Iran's military does not fight by the old rules. They fight with proxies, with drones, with sea
minutes, secondsmines, and with a population that, while critical of their own government, will unite against an invader. Trump ignored
minutes, secondsthem. He listened to the sirens singing from Tel Aviv. And now he is facing the consequences of his own hubris. The
minutesprotests outside Mara Lago are growing louder by the day. What was once a fortress of wealth and power is now a flash point for public fury. American
minutes, secondscitizens, many with children and grandchildren in the military, are gathering in the Florida heat, holding signs that call this what it is, a war
minutes, secondsfor Israel, not for America. They are screaming at the gates, demanding to know why their sons and daughters are being turned into cannon fodder to
minutes, secondssecure Benjamin Netanyahu's regional dominance. And inside, Trump is reportedly fuming, delusional, still
minutes, secondsrepeating the fantasy that Iran is about to call and surrender unconditionally. That surrender, of course, is a mirage.
minutes, secondsIt was always a mirage. It's vanishing in the heat of Iranian missiles and the smoke rising from US bases across the
minutes, secondsMiddle East. If you are just now joining us, I need you to do something for me. I need you to hit that like button and share this video right now. We are
minutes, secondsbringing you the truth that the corporate media is too scared to print.
minutes, secondsThey are still pushing the narrative of a strong America. But what we are seeing is a crumbling administration and a military in open revolt. Drop a comment,
minutes, secondseven if it's just a dot to tell the algorithm that you want real news. And if you haven't already, subscribe and
minutes, secondsturn on that notification bell. We are the only ones holding the line for honest journalism, and we need you with us. Now, let's peel back the layers of
minutes, secondsthis rotten onion because the stench coming from Washington is the smell of treason and corruption. To understand why the army generals are running away
minutes, secondsfrom a direct assault on Iran, you have to understand the genius of the Iranian defensive doctrine. This isn't Iraq in
minutes, secondsThis isn't a conventional army that lines up on a desert and waits to be destroyed by air power. The Iranian
minutes, secondsmilitary has spent decades preparing for exactly this scenario. They have built a layered, smart, and devastatingly
minuteseffective network of coastal defense missiles, fast attack boats, and crucially, the unmanned underwater vehicles I mentioned earlier. The
minutes, secondsPentagon knows that sending a surface fleet into the narrow confines of the Straight of Hormuz is suicide. These new Iranian sea drones are almost impossible
minutes, secondsto detect. They can swim alongside a destroyer and detonate at will. The radar systems that were destroyed in the
minutes, secondsopening days of this war weren't just old hardware. They were the eyes of the fleet. Blinding those eyes was a
minutes, secondscalculated move by Thrron. They are daring the US Navy to come closer to sail into the killing zone. But the refusal to engage goes beyond just
minutes, secondstactical fear. It is rooted in a deep strategic and moral objection to the entire premise of the war. These
minutes, secondsgenerals, many of whom served in Iraq and Afghanistan, know of forever war when they see one. They know that occupying Iranian territory or trying to
minutes, secondsseize their islands like Abu Musa or the greater and lesser Tums would be a quagmire that makes Vietnam look like a skirmish. The Iranians have a saying.
minutes, secondsYou have the watches, but we have the time. They will bleed the American occupation dry day by day, dollar by
minutes, secondsdollar, body by body. The generals read the intelligence that says the Iranian people are resilient. They saw how quickly the new supreme leader
minutes, secondsconsolidated power after the assassination of Ayatollah Kam.
minutes, secondsInstead of collapsing, the regime hardened. They warned Trump that if you kill the leader, you don't kill the
minutes, secondsrevolution. You give it a martyr and a reason to fight harder. And who was the loudest voice pushing for this carnage?
minutes, secondsWho was whispering in Trump's ear that the Iranian people would greet American troops with flowers and sweets? It was the same cabal that has been pushing for
minutes, secondsthis war for years. The Israeli lobby, specifically IPAC, and the government of Benjamin Netanyahu. Let's
minutesbe brutally honest here. This is not America's war. This is a subcontracted war for Israel. There is an overwhelming
minutes, secondsamount of evidence now that the strategic objectives of this conflict are being dictated not from the White House situation room but from
minutes, secondsNetanyahu's office in occupied Jerusalem. The goal was never to neutralize a threat to the United States
minutes, secondsbecause Iran posed none. The goal was to destroy Iran's ability to act as a counterweight to Israeli power in the
minutes, secondsregion. The goal was to drag America into a war of chaos that keeps the Middle East fragmented, weak, and unable
minutes, secondsto challenge Israeli expansionism. And the American political system, soaked in IPAC money, went along with it. The extent to which the Trump administration
minutes, secondshas been compromised on this issue is now coming to light in the most dramatic fashion possible, and it centers on a man named Joe Kent. Joe Kent is not a
minutes, secondsfaceless bureaucrat. He is a patriot, a man who served his country in uniform.
minutesHe spent decades in the military, in the treacherous mountains of Afghanistan,
minutes, secondsand the dangerous streets of Iraq. He bled for his country. After his military service, he continued to serve his
minutes, secondsnation as a senior counterterrorism official. He was the director of the National Counterterrorism Center. He was inside the room. He was the one reading
minutes, secondsthe raw intelligence. And Joe Kent looked at the evidence and saw that there was absolutely zero, let me
minutes, secondsrepeat, zero credible intelligence suggesting Iran was planning an imminent attack on the United States. He saw the
minutes, secondsintelligence being twisted. He saw the assessments being cooked to fit a political narrative demanded by Israel.
minutes, secondsSo Joe Kent did something that should shake this nation to its core. He resigned. He walked away from power,
minutes, secondsfrom prestige, from a paycheck because he could not in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. In his
minutes, secondsresignation letter, he didn't mince words. He said, and I quote, "It is clear that we started this war due to
minutes, secondspressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby." Let that sink in. The top counterterrorism official in the
minutes, secondsUnited States is telling you that we are at war because of foreign pressure. He went on to say that a misinformation campaign orchestrated by highranking
minutes, secondsIsraeli officials and influential members of the American media was used to deceive the president into believing Iran posed an imminent threat. It was a
minutes, secondslie to draw us into a disastrous war just like the lies that drew us into Iraq in Joe Kent recently sat down
minutes, secondsfor an interview with Tucker Carlson and it is a mustwatch for every American who pays taxes. He laid out the argument
minutes, secondsagainst this war with the clarity of a man who has nothing left to lose and everything to tell. He explained that in the leadup to this war, robust debate
minutes, secondswas stifled. Key decision makers, people like him, were literally not allowed into the room to brief the president.
minutes, secondsThe sanity check that the intelligence community is supposed to provide was completely blocked. He pointed out the insane logic being used by war hawks
minutes, secondslike Secretary of State Marco Rubio who argued that Iran was a threat because Israel was about to attack them and therefore Iran might retaliate. That
minutes, secondscircular logic means that Israel can create a threat whenever they want simply by preparing to attack and the US
minutes, secondsis duty bound to jump in. Kent exposed this for what it is, a complete abdication of American sovereignty. He
minutes, secondsconfirmed that the only imminent threat was the one coming from Israel, not from Iran. He spoke of how the late Ayatollah
minutes, secondsKam was actually moderating Iran's nuclear program, acting as a break on proliferation. By assassinating him, the
minutes, secondsUS and Israel guaranteed that Iran will now more than ever seek the ultimate deterrent. This brings us to the wave of resignations that is hitting the administration. It's not just Joe Kent.
minutes, secondsThe exits are starting to pile up as people realize they are attached to a sinking ship steered by a captain taking orders from a foreign shore. They see
minutes, secondsthat the America first promise has been completely hollowed out. Trump ran on a platform of ending the endless wars. He
minutes, secondsmocked his predecessors for getting stuck in the Middle East quicksand. He said the US should not be the world's policeman. But what happened along the
minutes, secondsline? He got into office and suddenly the pressure became unbearable. He was surrounded by people like Jared Kushner,
minutes, secondswho according to allegations in the recently unsealed Epstein documents may have been influenced by forces far beyond the realm of normal diplomacy. We
minutes, secondshave to talk about the elephant in the room, the Epstein files. Recent releases have included explosive allegations from a credible intelligence source that
minutes, secondsDonald Trump himself may have been compromised by Israel. The documents alleged that Jeffrey Epstein was not just a pedophile, he was an intelligence
minutes, secondsasset linked to MSAD. The file suggests that Trump was compromised and that Jared Kushner was essentially running a
minutes, secondsshadow government heavily influenced by Israeli intelligence priorities. While these are allegations, they fit perfectly into the pattern of behavior
minutes, secondswe are witnessing. Why else would a president flip so completely on his core promise? Why else would he ignore the unanimous advice of his military
minutes, secondsgenerals? Why else would he attack a country that by every official intelligence estimate was not an
minutes, secondsimminent threat? The Mossad is famous for using compromat for finding leverage. If they had something on Trump, whether related to financial
minutes, secondsdealings with Russian oligarchs or the Epstein swamp, it would explain why the US Middle East policy is now simply a
minutes, secondsphotocopy of Netanyahu's liquid party platform. So, as we close this update,
minutes, secondslook at the picture forming. A president isolated and possibly compromised. A military leadership refusing to
minutes, secondsacrifice itself for a foreign agenda. A Pentagon in chaos. A patriot like Joe Kent raising the alarm about the Israeli
minutes, secondsstrangle hold on our foreign policy. And an enemy that is not only unbowed, but is hitting back harder than anyone predicted. The unthinkable has indeed
minutes, secondshappened. The generals have turned. The mutiny is real. And the Empire, drunk on its own arrogance, is realizing that it
minutes, secondspicked a fight it cannot win. Keep watching. Keep fighting. And remember,
minutes, secondsthe only way out of this mess is to tell the truth, no matter how ugly it gets.

[admin]

Russia ‘DARES’ US After Iran’s Bushehr Nuclear Plant Attack; ‘Dangerous Consequences…’ | Watch
Times Of India
Mar 19, 2026 #iran #bushehrnuclearplant #russia

High-resolution imagery has revealed the chilling aftermath of a projectile striking dangerously close to Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power reactor built by Russia. The images, reportedly taken on March 18, show the devastating impact just 350 meters from the facility’s heart. Experts say the debris points north—far from the Persian Gulf—raising urgent questions about the origin of the weapon. Meanwhile, the CEO of Rosatom, a Russian state nuclear energy corporation, slammed what he called “the first instance of a direct shelling of the station's territory” by the US and Israel, warning that it set a “dangerous precedent”.



Transcript

secondsA flash of destruction, a near miss that could have changed everything.
secondsHighresolution imagery now reveals the chilling aftermath of a projectile striking dangerously close to Iran's Busher nuclear power reactor.
secondsThe images reportedly taken on March th show the devastating impact just
secondsm from the facility's heart. Experts say the debris points north, far from
secondsthe Persian Gulf, raising urgent questions about the origin of the weapon.
secondsDavid Albbright, founder of the Institute for Science and International Security, added Iran to a growing list
secondsof potential actors alongside Israel and the United States, though he cautioned an Iranian strike may have been inadvertent.
secondsMeanwhile, calls grow louder from global authorities, including IAEA Chief Rafael Graci, urging restraint, open
minute, secondscommunication with Russia, and careful avoidance of nuclear targets. The world watches and waits as tensions teeter on the edge of escalation.
minute, secondsThe Busher nuclear power plant built by Russia's Rosatam has been operational since It is a megawatt
minute, secondsRussian-designed pressurized water reactor with expansion projects already underway. Following the March th
minute, secondsincident, Russia called for a safety zone to prevent catastrophe, citing significant nuclear materials on site.
minute, secondsEarlier on March th, the CEO of Rosatom, a Russian state nuclear energy corporation, slammed what he called the
minutes, secondsfirst instance of a direct shelling of the station's territory, warning that it set a dangerous precedent. Uh this marks
minutes, secondsthe first instance of direct shelling of the station's territory. Uh the projectile exploded causing damage to one of the buildings. It has no relation
minutes, secondsto uh the nuclear cycle. Uh it's part of the methological complex. But a dangerous precedent has been set. Uh in
minutes, secondsfact uh probably the first uh well certainly the first uh in this conflict
minutes, secondsuh and probably the first direct shelling of a nuclear power plants territory in literally at a distance of
minutes, secondsabout to m from of the reactor hall uh of an active nuclear reactor that is currently operating at full
minutes, secondspower. Um this is unacceptable. uh and of course we appeal to uh all sides to all parties involved in the conflict to
minutes, secondsprevent anything like this from happening again in the future. Well,
minutes, secondsfirst uh to ensure the equipment is supervised because the the second unit is uh in
minutes, secondssuch an active construction phase and much has been done on the third. So the equipment already on site must be supervised.
minutes, secondsThe International Atomic Energy Agency on March th said it had been informed by Iranian authorities about the
minutes, secondsincident at the country's only operational nuclear facility. The Vienna based agency stated on social media that
minutes, secondsthere was no damage to the plant or injuries to staff reported. Earlier on March th, the Russian foreign ministry
minutes, secondsblamed the US and Israel for the incident. We unequivocally condemn the irresponsible
minutes, secondsutterly unacceptable missile attack carried out against the inner perimeter of the Busher nuclear power station mere meters from an operational power unit.
minutes, secondsWe have repeatedly warned Israel and the United States of America who continue their aggressive military campaign against the Islamic Republic about the categorical unacceptability of creating
minutes, secondsthreats to the life and health of numerous Russian citizens remaining on siteista to constitute the personnel of the
minutes, secondsnuclear power plant. Despite multiple claims and conflicting accounts from Thran and Moscow, neither Iran nor
minutes, secondsRussia has released any images of the damage. And crucially, both have stopped short of reporting any release of
minutes, secondsnuclear material from the incident near the Busher facility, underscoring the uncertainty and the stakes at play.
minutes, secondsIran allegedly targeted Deona and Negev nuclear research center as a tit fortat to an earlier attack near Busher nuclear
minutes, secondspower plant. The claim was made by pro-IRRGC accounts after a projectile targeted an area near Iran's Busher
minutes, secondsnuclear power plant. However, it caused no damage or injuries. Iran told the International Atomic Energy Agency.
minutes, secondsThe IAEA has been informed by Iran that a projectile hit the premises of the Busher NP on Tuesday evening. No damage
minutes, secondsto the plant or injuries to staff reported. The UN nuclear watchdog said on X. The strike came in the third week
minutes, secondsof the USIsraeli war on Iran.
minutes, secondsIAEA Chief Raphael Gross reiterated his call for maximum restraint during the conflict to avoid the risk of a nuclear accident.
minutes, secondsIran's atomic energy organization confirmed the strike earlier in the day with the country's Tashnim news agency
minutessaying the projectile hit the vicinity of the nuclear power plant in the port city of Bucher at around p.m. local time Tuesday.
minutes, secondsRosatam, Russia's state nuclear energy corporation, condemned the strike on Tuesday, adding that radiation levels
minutes, secondsaround the plant, whose construction was started by a German company in the s and later completed by Russia, were normal.
minutes, secondsInitially, this was not part of the plans for the United States and its allies. They intentionally raised the stakes, fueling hysteria regarding alleged Iranian nuclear weapon plans,
minutes, secondswhich were never supported by IAEA reports, contrary to what we heard today from the US representative. This was done to implement their agenda and
minutes, secondsbeyond. The Iran nuclear issue must ultimately return to the track of political and diplomatic resolution. I
minutes, secondswant to emphasize that the Chinese side strongly condemns any actions that violate international law and the fundamental purposes and principles of
minutes, secondthe United Nations Charter. The Chinese side strongly condemns this.
minutes, secondsSo what this means in plain language is that all member states of the United Nations should be implementing an arms
minutes, secondsembargo against Iran, banning the transfer and trade of missile technology and freezing relevant financial assets
minutes, secondsin line with the robust UN sanctions that had been in place before and have now been snapped back into place.
minutes, secondsThe UN provisions to be reimposed are not arbitrary, but instead narrowly scoped to address the threat posed by
minutes, secondsIran's nuclear, missile, and conventional arms programs and Iran's
minutes, secondsongoing support for terrorism. Iran had ample opportunity to prevent this
minutes, secondsoutcome. France, the United Kingdom, and Germany offered to extend the so-called snapback mechanism if Iran were to
minutes, secondsaccount for its highlyenriched uranium stockpile if Iran would comply with IAEA
minutes, secondsobligations that were already mandatory under the NPT and
minutes, secondsif Iran would resume direct diplomacy with the United states. All of those options were put on the table in good
minutes, secondsfaith for Iran and all of them were rejected. It also confirmed, this is the IAEA director general's report, that for
minutes, secondsover eight months now, Iran has refused to provide the IAEA with updated information
minutes, secondson with updated information on or access to this highlyenriched uranium stockpile
minutes, secondsor other previously declared lowenriched uranium stocks at facilities affected by military strikes in June The truth
minutesof the matter is that Russia and China do not want a functional committee, not out of some type of legal objection, but
minutes, secondsbecause they want to protect their partner Iran and can continue to maintain defense cooperation
minutes, secondsthat is now once again prohibited. All of this while Iran continues to evade sanctions, fire ballistic missiles and
minutes, secondsdrones at civilian uh at civilians in the region and attack shipping civilian
minutes, secondsshipping in the Gulf and wreak havoc in the Strait of Hormuz.
minutes, secondsSo colleagues, let's let's end, you know, uh enough of the performative hand ringing over supposedly over process.
minutes, secondsThe reality is Russia and China do not want this committee because it will continue to protect their partner Iran.
minutes, secondIn light of that, the United States will continue to work to ensure Iran can no
minutes, secondslonger hold the world hostage with its missile drone and certainly not a
minutes, secondsnuclear program. The UK has been clear all that time that we favored negotiation and diplomacy,
minutes, secondsbut we have repeatedly seen Iran not act in good faith to address international concerns.
minutes, secondsSo I want to start by expressing solidarity with our partners in the Gulf and the wider region who took no part in the military action launched on th
minutes, secondsFebru February but who have been been the target of waves of repeated and unprovoked Iranian missile and drone attacks over the last weekend over the
minutes, secondslast week. We strongly condemn these attacks. They are endangering civilians,
minutes, secondsdestabilizing the region and threatening the global economy. they must stop.
minutes, secondWe pay tribute to the swift actions taken by those partners to protect civilians, including UK nationals.
minutes, secondsWe will not overlook actions that undermine international security or the global non-prololiferation regime.
minutes, secondsIran's reckless and repeated use of ballistic missiles,
minutes, secondsincluding against its neighbors without provocation,
minutes, secondshas intensified regional insecurity and heightened the risk to civilians.
minutes, secondsOur concerns about its nuclear program remain serious and long-standing.
minutes, secondsIran has persistently failed to fulfill its safeguard obligations and fully cooperate with the IAEA. In fact, the subsequent events and most especially
minutes, secondsthose we've been compelled to observe during the course of the past week and a half have clearly demonstrated that diplomatic initially this was not part
minutes, secondsof the plans for the United States and its allies. They intentionally raised the stakes fueling hysteria regarding alleged Iranian nuclear weapon plans which were never supported by IAA
minutes, secondsreports contrary to what we heard today from the US representative. This was done to implement their agenda and beyond. Within this specific context, we wish to emphatically remind all present
minutes, secondsthat the Russian Federation, with the utmost clarity and conviction,
minutes, secondsunequivocally condemns the recent act of armed aggression perpetrated against the sovereign nation of Iran by the forces of the United States and Israel. This
minutes, secondsaction stands in direct and undeniable violation of the established principles of the United Nations Charter and the fundamental norms of international law. Such actions are unjustifiable,
minutes, secondsespecially by groundless claims regarding Iran's peaceful nuclear program should be respected. The United States
minutes, secondsand Israel should immediately stop military action and not attack facilities in Iran that are subject to safeguards the
minutes, secondsinternational atomic energy agency. It is imperative to prevent any further escalation of the current volatile tensions and to ensure that the conflict
minutes, secondsdoes not spread across the broader Middle East region.
minutes, secondsAll parties should remain calm and exercise restraint, fulfill their obligations under international law, and effectively ensure the safety of
minutes, secondscivilians and civilian facilities. The international community should send a clear and unequivocal message opposing the world's regression to the law of the jungle.
minutes, secondsSecondly, the Iran nuclear issue must ultimately return to the track of political and diplomatic resolution.
minutes, secondsI want to emphasize that the Chinese side strongly condemns any actions that violate international law and the
minutes, secondsfundamental purposes and principles of the United Nations Charter.
minutes, secondsThe Chinese side strongly condemns this.
minutes, secondsWe strongly urge the United States to immediately change its current course,
minutes, secondsreturn to genuine diplomatic negotiations, and unequivocally commit to never again resorting to military force,
minutes, secondsengage in genuine and frank discussions with Iran in order to achieve a comprehensive solution that fully aligns with the expectations of the international community.
minutes, secondsIt is important that European nations cease adding fuel to the fire and instead contribute constructively to
minutes, secondsdeescalating the situation. The proper resolution of the Iranian nuclear issue is vital for the authority and
minutes, secondseffectiveness of the international non-prololiferation system and is crucial for peace and stability in the Middle East.
minutes, secondsAs a permanent member of the Security Council and a participant in the JCPO
minutes, secondsChina will continue to uphold an objective and impartial stance,
minutes, secondsstrengthen communication and coordination with all parties, forge a collective force, and champion fairness.

[admin]

Iran Just Nuked the Global Gas Market: The $20B Ras Laffan Strike That Set Qatar on Fire
Warfare Meet History
Mar 19, 2026

On March 19, 2026, the "Doomsday Scenario" for global energy became a reality as Iranian ballistic missiles successfully bypassed regional defenses to strike Ras Laffan Industrial City, the crown jewel of Qatar’s energy sector. The $20 billion impact of this strike has effectively "nuked" the global gas market, sending European and Asian prices into a vertical surge.The Scale of the "Ras Laffan Inferno":17% of Global Capacity Gone: QatarEnergy CEO Saad al-Kaabi confirmed that the strikes knocked out two of Qatar’s 14 LNG trains and a major gas-to-liquids (GTL) facility.
This represents a loss of 12.8 million tons of LNG per year—a deficit that will take three to five years to repair.The "Force Majeure" Wave: For the first time in its history, Qatar has been forced to declare long-term force majeure on contracts to Italy, Belgium, South Korea, and China. With no strategic reserve for LNG equivalent to the Global Oil Reserve, these nations are now facing an immediate, unpluggable supply gap.
Market Explosion: Natural gas futures in the EU (Dutch TTF) skyrocketed by 35% in a single morning, hitting €74/MWh. In the UK, prices doubled as traders realized the "Siren Economy" has lost its most reliable supplier. Brent crude also receded only slightly after briefly touching $119 per barrel.
The Geopolitical Fallout:Trump’s "South Pars" Ultimatum: Following the strike, President Trump posted a "Red Line" warning on Truth Social, threatening to "massively blow up the entirety of the South Pars Gas Field"—the Iranian side of the shared reservoir—if Qatar is targeted again.
This marks the closest the world has come to a total "Energy War" where both sides' production is systematically leveled.The "Ramadan" Breach: Minister Al-Kaabi expressed profound shock that the attack occurred during the holy month of Ramadan, labeling it an "irresponsible approach" by a "brotherly Muslim country."
In response, Qatar has ordered all Iranian military and security attaches to leave the country within 24 hours.The Global "Demand Destruction": Energy analysts warn that prices have now reached "unbearable levels" that will force mandatory industrial shutdowns across Europe and Asia.
South Korea’s chipmakers and India’s fertilizer producers are already reporting critical shortages of helium and LPG feedstocks.With the Strait of Hormuz still effectively closed by "Kinetic Mining," the physical destruction of the Ras Laffan infrastructure means that even if the waterway reopens tomorrow, the global gas market will remain in a state of structural deficit until nearly 2030.



Transcript

a.m. Eastern Standard Time,
secondsThursday, March th, A trader on the floor of the Intercontinental Exchange in London is staring at a screen that hours ago he would have
secondsdescribed as impossible. Natural gas futures. The benchmark Dutch TTF contract, the number that heats homes in Amsterdam, powers factories in
secondsStuttgart, and sets electricity bills from Lisbon to Warsaw, have just printed a number that hasn't been seen since January of €per megawatt hour.
secondsand it's still climbing. He picks up a phone. He does not say hello. He says simply, "How bad is Ross Laughen?"
secondsBecause somewhere in the back of every energy trader's mind for the past weeks, that has been the question. Not if, how bad. Now, they have an answer.
secondsAnd the answer is very, very bad. Let's back up because this story doesn't start at Ross Lafen. It doesn't even start in Qatar. It starts hours earlier in the
secondsdark above the Persian Gulf where an Israeli Air Force strike package. The exact composition of which has not been officially confirmed, but which
minutesatellite analysts and open source intelligence accounts identified as including F-I, a dear multi-roll fighters operating under a tight
minute, secondselectronic warfare umbrella, crossed into Iranian airspace, and made a decision that has now set the entire global energy market on fire. The target
minute, secondswas South Pars, the world's largest natural gas field. And here's the thing.
minute, secondsNobody was saying out loud until this morning. Trump didn't know it was happening. Trump admitted in what can only be described as a stunning
minute, secondsdiplomatic rupture with his own ally that Qatar was in no way, shape, or form involved with it. Nor did it have any idea that it was going to happen.
minute, secondsUnfortunately, Iran did not know this.
minute, secondsThat is the American president on the record telling the world that Israel launched a strike on the single most consequential piece of energy
minute, secondsinfrastructure in the Middle East. our infrastructure that sits directly next to Qatar's own gas reserves without telling Washington. Let that sentence
minute, secondssit for a moment and then ask yourself if Trump didn't know, who did? There's a third person in this story, someone who knew exactly what was going to happen at South Pars before the first bomb fell.
minutes, secondsWe'll get to that, but first you need to understand what was destroyed, why it matters, and why the ripple effects of what happened last night will be felt in your electricity bill at your gas pump,
minutes, secondsand potentially in the foreign policy of every major economy on Earth for the next decade. South Pars is not just a gas field. It is, in geological terms, a
minutes, secondsshared formation that straddles the maritime border between Iran and Qatar and the Persian Gulf. on the Iranian side, south pars on the Qatari side, the
minutes, secondsnorth field. Together, they constitute the single largest natural gas deposit ever discovered on the surface of this planet. Iran section alone provides
minutes, secondsroughly % of Iran's domestic natural gas supply. It is the arterial blood of the Iranian economy. It supplies Turkey
minutes, secondsvia pipeline. It is quite literally the lungs of the regime. The attacks on Roslafen were a retaliation for Israeli attacks this week on South Pars, part of the world's largest natural gas field.
minutes, secondsSouthpar is not only critical to Iran's domestic electricity supply, it also supplies Turkey via pipeline. So when Israeli munitions began impacting
minutes, secondsSouthpar's extraction platforms and processing hubs in the early hours of Wednesday, March th, and when Iranian state media began confirming significant
minutes, secondsstructural damage to the Asaluya oil facility on the same coastline, the retaliation was not a question. It was a countdown. The IRGC, the Islamic
minutes, secondsRevolutionary Guard Corps, Iran's most powerful military institution, and the organization that has been running Iran's retaliatory strategy since the
minutes, secondsassassination of Supreme Leader Ali Kamune does not do proportionality. It does escalation. And within hours of the
minutes, secondsSouthpar strikes, the countdown hit zero. Iran threatened to attack oil and gas facilities across the Gulf region in
minutes, secondsretaliation for an Israeli attack on its South Pars gas field. Iran's warning of attacks was directed at Qatar's Misaid
minutes, secondspetrochemical complex. Mised Holding Company and Raz Lefan refinery, Saudi Arabia's Samrif refinery and Jubel
minutes, secondpetrochemical complex and the United Arab Emirates Alhausen gas field. That was the warning. Thran gave a list, a
minutes, secondsshopping list of targets. And then methodically, precisely, and with terrifying operational competence, it began working through that list. Here's
minutes, secondswhat nobody is telling you. Before a single Iranian missile left its launch pad, before the first plume of smoke rose above Roslafen, there were already
minutes, secondsfully loaded LNG tankers sitting in the Persian Gulf, unable to move. Tanker movement through the straight of Hormuz that was handling about % of global
minutes, secondsoil supplies is largely blocked. Randere Jiswall, India's external ministry of affairs, told CNBC on the phone the
minutes, secondscountry was in ongoing discussions with Iran to get ships through the straight. Two ships have already reached India via the passageway. two out of
minutes, secondsThe world's most critical maritime choke point is functionally closed. And into that already catastrophic situation,
minutes, secondsIran just dropped a match. Razaf, an industrial city, km northeast of Doha, home to the single largest concentration of liqufied natural gas production capacity on the planet,
minutes, secondsoperated by Qar Energy, the same Qar Energy whose CEO, Sad Alkabi, has spent the past three weeks telling European
minutes, secondsand Asian buyers that production would restart soon. It will not restart soon.
minutes, secondsThe Raz Lafan industrial city, home to the LNG plant that accounted for about a fifth of global supply before production was halted earlier this month, was hit
minutes, secondsby an Iranian missile after four others were intercepted, authorities said late Wednesday. Four missiles intercepted.
minutes, secondsOne got through, one was enough. Because Ros Lafen is not a single building. It is a km complex of liquefaction
minutes, secondstrains, cryogenic storage tanks, loading arms, jetties, and pipeline infrastructure. Much of it built over two decades at a cost that analysts at
minutes, secondsWood McKenzie now estimate represents somewhere north of billion in total capital investment. And parts of it are
minutes, secondsnow on fire. Qatar Energy CEO Sad Alabi said the Iran attack took out % of the country's liqufied natural gas export
minutes, secondscapacity. %. That is not a rounding error. Qatar produces million metric tonses of LNG annually. Qatar's state
minutes, secondsoil company Qatar Energy, the world's second largest LG exporter, said on Wednesday that Iranian missile attacks on Roslafen caused extensive damage,
minutes, secondswhile the UAE shut gas facilities after intercepting missiles early on Thursday.
minutes, secondsBut the headline number, % actually understates the problem. Because Qatar had already on March nd halted all LG
minutes, secondsproduction after the first wave of Iranian drone strikes. Qatar halted LG production on March nd due to Iranian drone strikes at Ross Laughen and Mised
minutes, secondsIndustrial City. The Gulf state is the second largest LNG exporter in the world after the U. Essar accounts for nearly % of global LG exports. So the %
minutes, secondscapacity damage from Wednesday's missile strike is damage to a facility that is already offline. The question is no longer when Qar restarts. The question
minutes, secondsis whether the physical infrastructure can ever be restored on a timeline that is measured in months rather than years.
minutes, secondsQatar Energy says damage at LG facilities could take years to repair,
minutes, secondsupending the supply outlook. Years, not months. Years. The global LG market is now looking at a structural supply hole
minutes, secondsthat no amount of spot cargos from the United States, Australia, or Canada fill on short notice. Existing LG plants globally are running at or near
minutes, secondscapacity. And new LG supply that is expected this year, including from the United States, Canada, and Australia,
minutes, secondsmay not come in time to help with the current shock. There is, in the blunt assessment of an Sophie Corbo, a researcher at the Center on Global
minutes, secondsEnergy Policy at Columbia University, no immediate answer to this crisis on the gas side. And this is where the domino effect becomes almost incomprehensible
minutes, secondsin its scale. The front month gas price at the Dutch title transfer facility hub, a European benchmark for natural gas trading, traded up over % at
minutes, seconds€per megawatt hour. But that was the morning number. By midm morning in London, benchmark Dutch gas prices hit
minutes, secondsper megawatt hour, their highest level since January And here is the critical context. Gas prices in
minutes, secondsEurope have now since the US and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury on February th doubled, not risen, doubled. As of
minutes, secondsThursday, Dutch natural gas futures, the European benchmark, have doubled.
minutes, secondsSpeaking on the sidelines of an EU summit Thursday, Belgian Prime Minister Bart Dewaver said EU officials were very worried about the energy crisis. The
minutes, secondsEuropean Union is now in real time debating emergency price caps. The European Union was weighing capping natural gas prices to curb a jump in
minutes, secondselectricity costs. In Asia, it is even more acute. The supply shock has triggered widespread gas rationing across the economy, according to Wood
minutes, secondsMcKenzie, with clothing manufacturers facing significant production curtailment.
minutes, secondsBangladesh, where half of all electricity generation is gas fired, is rationing power across entire sectors of its economy. The garment factories that
minutes, secondsproduce fast fashion for Western consumers are running on reduced hours.
minutes, secondstankers originally bound for Europe have rerouted to Asia since the war began. According to Gillian Bakra,
minutes, secondssenior director of gas and power at commodities intelligence provider Capler. That rerouting is now putting upward pressure on European prices in a
minutes, secondsfeedback loop that has no natural ceiling. And oil, let's talk about oil.
minutes, secondsBrent futures were up $or % at
minutes, secondss a barrel by GMT. Earlier in the session, Brent had climbed more than $to a high of $
minutes, secondsclose to the three and a halfyear peak touched on March th. A gallon of gas at American pumps is now frequently crossing $in the use. A gallon of gas
minutes, secondsis now frequently above $The Federal Reserve, which held interest rates steady on Wednesday, is already projecting higher inflation. The US
minutes, secondsCentral Bank held interest rates steady on Wednesday, projecting higher inflation as policy makers take stock of the impact of the war. That means the
minutes, secondsFed is trapped. If they raise rates to fight energy inflation, they risk triggering a recession in an economy already absorbing a supply shock. If
minutes, secondsthey do nothing, gas hits $by Memorial Day. There is no good option.
minutes, secondsDan Pickering, founder and CIO of Pickering Energy Partners, captured it best. We're moving from a supply chain problem to potentially a supply problem.
minutes, secondsThere's a big difference. You fix supply chain problems quickly. If you start changing the ability to produce, whether it's LNG or oil, then all of a sudden
minutes, secondsyou can't move the same amount of volumes because the volumes aren't there. This is an escalation.
minutes, secondsBut here's the catch. The thing that nobody in the cable news cycle is talking about this morning because they're too busy showing satellite
minutes, secondsimagery of burning infrastructure. The man who may have the most to gain from $oil, economically speaking, is the man currently sitting in the Oval
minutes, secondsOffice. Saul Kavanich, head of research at Australia's MST Marquee, said attacks on Roslafen could cause a lasting global gas shortage, but this won't pressure
minutes, secondsthe Trump administration because the US benefits economically from high global gas prices. Read that again slowly. The United States, now the world's largest
minutes, secondsLNG exporter, makes more money when global gas prices are higher. American LG producers, the companies operating the Sabine Pass terminal in Louisiana,
minutes, secondsthe Corpus Christi facility in Texas,
minutes, secondsthe Freeport LNG complex are tonight looking at cargo contracts that are suddenly worth considerably more than they were hours ago. There is a
minutes, secondsstructural economic incentive baked into American energy dominance that make sustained high prices not entirely unwelcome in certain Washington corridors. That is not speculation. That is what analysts are saying privately.
minutes, secondsNow, the third person in the room,
minutes, secondsremember I told you there was someone who knew what was going to happen at South Par before the bombs fell. Someone who knew that an Israeli strike on
minutes, secondsIranian gas infrastructure would trigger an Iranian retaliation against Ross Laughen. Someone who knew that the cascading effect of that retaliation
minutes, secondswould be a price spike that benefits one country's export sector enormously.
minutes, secondsWe're not going to name this person because the intelligence community is still working through the chain of authorization. What we can tell you is this. Trump appears to be trying to dial
minutes, secondsdown the intensity of the attacks. He said there would be no more attacks on South Pars unless Iran attacked Qatar first. Trump is publicly distancing
minutes, secondshimself from the Southpar strike. He's telling the world he didn't authorize it. He is in effect throwing Israel under the bus diplomatically. Even as
minutes, secondshis own defense secretary stands at a Pentagon podium and frames it as a strategic success. US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegsath calls Israel's
minutes, secondsstrike on Iran's South Pars gas field a warning, urging Iran against continuing its retaliatory strikes on energy sites across the Gulf. So the defense
minutes, secondssecretary calls it a warning. The president calls it unauthorized. And in between those two statements, in the gap between what Hexath says at the Pentagon
minutes, secondsand what Trump posts on social media, is where the real policy is being made, or rather unmade. Let's go deeper into the diplomatic wreckage because it tells you
minuteseverything about why this war is so hard to stop. On February th, Steve Witoff,
minutes, secondsTrump's special envoy to the Middle East, a real estate developer from New York with no prior diplomatic experience and a now legendary inability to master
minutes, secondsthe technical details of nuclear physics, sat in a room in Moscat, Oman.
minutes, secondsHe was not in the same room as Iranian foreign minister Abasaragi. The first round of talks held on February in Moscat, Oman, was primarily conducted
minutes, secondsindirectly, according to a Persian Gulf diplomat. Omani intermediaries held separate meetings with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Aragchi and then with
minutes, secondsWitkoff and Jared Kushner. Messages were carried down a hallway by Omani diplomats. That was the architecture of peace. A hallway and envelopes and
minutes, secondsintermediaries against the backdrop of kg of % enriched uranium and an Israeli air force that was even then
minutes, secondsapparently drawing up target packages for South Pars. Whitov says Iran's top negotiators boasted in the first round of negotiations of having enough
minutes, secondshighlyenriched uranium to build nuclear bombs. In that first meeting,
minutes, secondsboth the Iranian negotiators said to us directly with no shame that they controlled kg of % enriched uranium and that they're aware that could make nuclear bombs.
minutes, secondsThe Iranians were proud of it. Witoff and Kushner, by his own account, looked at each other flumxed. Here is the problem with that account. A Persian
minutes, secondsGulf diplomat with direct knowledge of those same talks told NBC News categorically that Wititov's description of the conversation was false. The
minutes, secondsIranians told Witoff that Iran was willing to give up the enriched uranium as part of a new agreement with Trump.
minutes, secondsAccording to the Persian Gulf diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity, two wildly different versions of the same conversation, two wildly different
minutes, secondsrealities. And the disconnect between those two realities is part of why Operation Epic Fury launched on February th. Three rounds of talks, a hallway
minutes, secondsin Muscat, and then bombs. There were three rounds of nuclear talks total before the war started. Less than hours before the US and Israeli
minutescoordinated strikes on Iran began on Febir US special envoy, Steve Wickoff and President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner met with
minutes, secondsIranian foreign minister Abbas Aragshi in Geneva for a third round of Omani mediated talks aimed at reaching a nuclear agreement. Despite Omani for
minutes, secondsForeign Minister Bad Bin Hammed al-Busidi's assessment that the United States and Iran made substantial progress toward a nuclear deal during
minutes, secondsthe Febru March nd for technical talks, Trump said he was not happy with the progress
minutes, secondsor the way they're negotiating. And then the next day, the bombs fell. The Omani foreign minister assessed substantial progress. Trump said not happy. And less
minutes, secondsthan hours after that final meeting in a Geneva conference room, FASuper Hornets launched from the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln in an
minutes, secondsundisclosed location in the Gulf. An operation epic fury began. Now weeks into this war, the question is whether
minutes, secondsany diplomatic architecture survives at all. And here is where it gets extraordinarily complicated. Ali Kam is dead. The supreme leader of the Islamic
minutes, secondsRepublic, the man who had final authority over every nuclear decision,
minutes, secondsevery proxy decision, every missile decision, was killed in the opening strikes of this war. In his absence, a man named Ali Larajani has emerged as
minutes, secondsIran's deacto civilian leader. Larajani is not a hotthead. He is a pragmatist.
minutes, secondsHe has served in senior security roles for decades. He is by the assessment of US intelligence officials, someone who understands what a deal would look like.
minutes, secondsAnd it is Larjani who is now coordinating with Araji. The Iranian foreign minister seems to be coordinating with the secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council
minutes, secondsAli Larijani who has been Iran's deacto civilian leader since the assassination of former Supreme Leader Ali Kam.
minutes, secondsSources say US officials see Arachi as the go-to interlocutor because they have a pre-existing relationship with him and
minutes, secondshe's still alive. He's still alive. that phrase in a sentence about diplomatic relations. That is the world we are now
minutes, secondliving in. And yet, signal number one, a direct communications channel was reactivated just days ago. A direct communications channel between US envoy
minutes, secondsSteve Witoff and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Arachi has been reactivated in recent days. According to a US official and a source with
minutes, secondsknowledge, it's the first known direct communication between the parties since the war started more than two weeks ago.
minutes, secondstext messages sent between a man representing a government that has been bombing Iran for three weeks and a foreign minister who immediately denied
minutes, secondsthe contact existed. Aragchi issued a denial after this story published writing on X. My last contact with Mr.
minutes, secondsWitoff was prior to his employer's decision to kill diplomacy with another illegal military attack on Iran. Any claim to the contrary appears geared
minutes, secondssolely to mislead oil traders and the public. He's denying talking to the Americans in public, but he's texting them in private. That gap between the
minutes, secondspublic denial and the private text message is where every possible diplomatic off-ramp currently lives. It is the most important gap in geopolitics
minutes, secondsright now, and it is razor thin. Trump acknowledged it himself in the most Trump way imaginable. Trump said Iran
minutes, secondshad communicated with the US, but that it was unclear if the Iranian officials involved were authorized to make a deal.
minutes, secondsThey want to make a deal. They are talking to our people. We have no idea who they are, Trump told reporters. The president of the United States does not
minutes, secondsknow who he is negotiating with. The people reaching out from Iran, he cannot confirm whether they have the authority to bind the regime. That is not a
minutes, secondsnegotiation. That is a mystery wrapped inside a war. But here's the catch. And this one is the pivot that changes everything you thought you understood about who has leverage here. The IRGC,
minutes, secondsthe Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps,
minutes, secondsthe people who fired the missiles that hit Ross Laughen last night. They are not Larajani. They are not Arachi. They are not texting Witoff. The IRGC has its
minutes, secondsown command structure, its own intelligence apparatus, its own political objectives. And the IRGC's objectives are not necessarily aligned
minuteswith what Larajani wants. The IRGC has spent the last three weeks executing a retaliatory strategy that is calibrated not just to inflict economic pain on
minutes, secondsIsrael and the Gulf states, but to demonstrate to Iran's domestic population, to the millions of Iranians living through power cuts because
minutes, secondsSouthpars is now damaged, that the regime can strike back, that it is not broken, that it matters. Rob Gist Pinfold, lecturer in defense studies at
minutes, secondsKing's College London, told Al Jazera that Iran knows exactly what it's doing by attacking the Gulf countries. These countries have less of an appetite for a fight because at the end of the day,
minutes, secondsthis is not their war. So Iran is banking that they will want a ceasefire as soon as possible. That they will be pressuring the Trump administration.
minutes, secondsThat is the IRGC's strategic bet. Hit Qatar, hit Saudi Arabia, hit Kuwait, hit the UAE, force the Gulf States, the
minutes, secondscountries that have been quietly hosting American military infrastructure, the countries that need peace more than they need a proxy war, to pressure Washington
minutes, secondsinto pulling back. And so far, that strategy is working. Qatar expelled Iran's military and security attaches within hours of the strike. Qatar's
minutes, secondsforeign ministry declared the Iranian embassy's military and security attaches as persona nongrada along with their staff, demanding that they leave Qatar
minutes, secondswithin hours. But Qatar is also the country that was until last night the most important diplomatic back channel
minutes, secondsbetween Washington and Thran. Qatar mediated the Gaza ceasefire. Qatar hosted American bases. Qatar was the
minutes, secondscountry where Witkoff and Kushner were supposed to travel on Thursday to hold preliminary talks before heading to Oman. That trip is now in serious
minutes, secondsquestion and Saudi Arabia is on the knife's edge. Saudi Arabia said it intercepted and destroyed four ballistic missiles launched toward Riyad. Saudi
minutes, secondsAramco's Samref refinery in which Exxon holds a stake in the Red Sea port of Yanbu was also targeted in an aerial attack on Thursday. Oil loadings at the
minutes, secondsport were briefly halted. Yanboo is Saudi Arabia's only remaining outlet for crude exports. Let that fact register.
minutes, secondsIf Iranian strikes disable the Yamu terminal, if the port that carries Saudi crude to the world market is taken offline for any sustained period, you're
minutes, secondsno longer talking about $oil. You're talking about price levels that make $look like a rounding error. Tom Cloa, G
minutes, secondsOil's senior energy adviser, described this scenario as an all bets are off moment. Gulf Oil's senior energy adviser Tom Cloa warned that markets could enter
minutes, secondsan all bets are off scenario if the conflict spills beyond the Gulf and begins targeting energy infrastructure.
minutes, secondsWe are already there. We have already entered that scenario. Kuwait's Mina Almadi refinery, a facility that sits on the northern shore of the Gulf and has
minutes, secondsbeen processing Kuwaiti crude for years, was hit by Iranian drones Thursday morning. Kuwait Petroleum Corporation said an operational unit at
minutes, secondsits MINA Al- Amadi refinery was hit by a drone, igniting a limited fire. Abu Dhabi was forced to shut down its Hobshin gas facilities entirely after
minutes, secondsfalling debris from intercepted Iranian missiles caused structural damage. Hours later, Abu Dhabi shut its Hobshin gas facilities after they were hit by
minutes, secondfalling debris from an intercepted strike. The UAE, a country that has prided itself on remaining above the fray, on maintaining diplomatic channels
minutes, secondsto everyone, is now absorbing collateral damage from a war it wanted no part of.
minutes, secondsHere is the geopolitical domino effect in its full terrifying clarity. Qatar,
minutes, seconds% of global LNG offline, straight of Hormuz, % of global oil functionally blocked. Yamu, Saudi crude export capacity temporarily disrupted. Havshan,
minutes, secondsUAE gas production shut down. Kuwait,
minutes, secondstwo refineries on fire. European gas prices doubled since February th.
minutes, secondsAsian gas prices in crisis rationing territory. Brent crude $before the trading day was an hour old. American gas pumps above $a gallon and rising.
minutes, secondsFederal Reserve trapped between inflation and recession. Bangladesh rationing electricity. Turkey potentially losing its Southpar's
minutes, secondspipeline supply. There could also be competition incoming from Turkey following the South Pars attack. If Turkeykey's supply is compromised, the
minutes, secondscountry might try to buy LG from elsewhere, potentially putting further upward pressure on prices around the world. And Shell, the world's largest LG
minutes, secondstrader, which has facilities inside the Ros Lafen complex, is currently assessing any potential impact. Ros Lafen is an energy industry hub and hosts several international companies,
minutes, secondsincluding Shell, the world's biggest LG trader. Shell is currently assessing any potential impact. A spokesperson said
minutes, secondsthat sentence currently assessing is corporate speak for we have no idea how bad this is yet but it's very bad. Now
minutes, secondsthe nuclear question because underneath all of this u underneath the gas prices and the oil prices and the diplomatic
minutes, secondstext messages there is the question that started this entire chain of events. Iran's nuclear program. In June
minutes, secondsIsrael and the US destroyed Iran's entire fleet of around nuclear centrifuges, its entire multiaceted weaponization program, most of its three
minutes, secondsmajor nuclear sites, and dozens of minor nuclear sites. It also killed most of its leading nuclear scientists. That was the first wave, June And then nine
minutes, secondsmonths later, despite all of that destruction, despite the dead scientists, despite the crushed centrifuges, Iran's negotiators sat
minutes, secondsacross a table from Steve Witoff and told him they still had kg of %
minutes, secondsenriched uranium. Wickoff maintained that the country's three main enrichment and conversion centers were in fact destroyed, but Tran has not publicly
minutes, secondsacknowledged such destruction. US and Israeli intelligence currently believe Iran is at least years from producing a functional nuclear weapon given
minutes, secondseverything that's been destroyed. But the enriched uranium stockpile, the feed stock, may still exist somewhere,
minutes, secondshidden, dispersed, hardened. Wickoff said they're probably a week away from having industrial-grade bomb- making material, and that's really dangerous. A
minutes, secondsweek if they rebuild. But rebuilding requires the centrifuges they no longer have. This is the paradox at the center of the entire conflict. The bombs
minutes, secondsdestroyed the factories. The uranium survived. And as long as the uranium survives, as long as those kg of %
minutes, secondsenriched material are unaccounted for and distributed to locations, US and Israeli intelligence cannot fully map.
minutes, secondsThe war has no clean ending. You can bomb the infrastructure. You cannot bomb the knowledge. And you cannot bomb the materials you cannot find. Pete Hexith
minutes, secondsstanding at a Pentagon podium this morning, March th, was asked whether yesterday's Southpar strike brought Iran closer to a deal or further from one.
minutes, secondsHexath says Iran has weaponized energy for decades. Israel clearly sent a warning and Trump has made it clear,
minutes, secondsvery clear. Iran knows when you hit Car Island and you hit military capabilities on Carg Island, which is the only thing we hit. We can hold anything at issue.
minutes, secondsThe United States military controls the fate of that country. The United States military controls the fate of that country. That is the message and it is
minutesthe message the IRGC is answering tonight with drones over Kuwait and missiles at Yamboo and the burning infrastructure of Ros Leafon. Trump's
minutes, secondsdissatisfaction and impatience with the negotiating process appear to have been fed in part by Witoff and Kushner's accounts of the US Iran talks. Comments
minutes, secondsmade by Witco in two background briefings with reporters on February and March rd made clear that Witoff did not have sufficient technical expertise
minutes, secondsor diplomatic experience to engage in effective diplomacy. His lack of knowledge and mischaracterization of Iran's positions and nuclear program throughout the process likely informed
minutes, secondsTrump's assessment that talks were not progressing and Iran was not negotiating seriously. In other words, the war that is now costing the global economy
minutes, secondshundreds of billions of dollars in energy disruption may have been at least in part a product of a misreading of bad information flowing upward to a
minutes, secondspresident who trusted the reading. That is the most chilling sentence in this entire story. The attacks on southpars in Iran and Qatar's Ross Laughen plant
minutes, secondsrepresent a sharp escalation not just in the conflict itself but in its implications for energy markets. Major infrastructure damage means facilities could take months or years, not weeks,
minutes, secondsto restart. The head of energy price risk solutions at Heartree Partners said it plainly. And Wood McKenzie, the firm that has been tracking global LG flows
minutes, secondsfor three decades, said the Rosen strikes fundamentally alter the global natural gas market outlook. The latest
minutes, secondsstrikes on Roslafen fundamentally alter the global natural gas market outlook according to Wood McKenzie, a data and analytics company. fundamentally, not significantly, not materially,
minutes, secondsfundamentally. Right now, as this script is being written, Wickoff's phone is presumably still active. Aragchi is publicly denying he's talking to anyone.
minutes, secondsLarijani is coordinating from somewhere in Iran. The IRGC is deciding whether to fire another missile at Yanbu. Trump is on social media threatening to massively
minutes, secondsblow up the entirety of the Southpar's gas field if Qatar is attacked again.
minutes, secondsTrump earlier warned Iran in a statement on social media not to retaliate by attacking Qatari LNG facilities again and threatened to massively blow up the
minutes, secondsentirety of the South Pars gas field if it did so. That threat was issued after Qatar was attacked. Qatar has already been attacked which means that threat
minutes, secondshas either already failed as a deterrent or the next strike triggers a response of overwhelming force that sets the entire South Pars formation shared between Iran and Qatar permanently
minutes, secondsablaze. France's Emanuel Mcronone issued a call from the sidelines of the EU summit this morning for an immediate moratorium on strikes targeting energy
minutes, secondsinfrastructure. It is in our common interest to implement without delay a moratorium on strikes targeting civilian infrastructure, particularly energy and
minutes, secondswater supply facilities. Civilian populations and their essential needs as well as the security of energy supplies must be protected from military
minutes, secondsescalation. Macron said it is a moral statement and a correct one. It is also a statement made by a leader who has no aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf
minutes, secondsand no leverage in either Thran or Tel Aviv. India is trying to thread the needle. India continues to increase energy purchases from Russia. Randere
minutes, secondsJiswal, India's external ministry of affairs told CNBC the country was in ongoing discussions with Iran to get ships through the strait. Two ships have
minutes, secondsalready reached India via the passageway. Russia is watching all of this with the quiet satisfaction of a country whose main export product just
minutes, secondsbecame the most sought-after commodity on Earth. Moscow is not interested in this war ending quickly. So, where does this leave us? Right here, March th,
minutes, secondsBrent crude sitting above and threatening to push back toward $
minutes, secondsEuropean gas doubled. Ross Lafen offline damaged for potentially years. The straight of Hormuz functionally closed.
minutes, secondstankers stranded. The IRGC still firing. Laurani and Witoff exchanging text messages through a channel that both sides deny exists publicly.
minutes, secondsNetanyahu and the Israeli military drawing target packages for facilities that if struck will push global energy prices to levels that destabilize governments across the developing world.
minutes, secondsAnd Trump caught between a defense secretary who calls a unilateral Israeli strike a warning, an ally who didn't tell him what it was planning, and a gas
minutes, secondspump back home crossing $that will show up in his approval ratings before the month is out. In the next to hours, the world will find out which version of this story we are living in.
minutes, secondsVersion one, the text messages between RXG and Witco turn into something real.
minutes, secondsLarijani calculating that the IRGC's energy war has achieved its strategic purpose, that the Gulf States are now screaming at Washington for restraint,
minutes, secondsthat the economic pressure on Europe and Asia is enough to force American action,
minutes, secondssignals through back channels that Iran is willing to discuss a pause. Trump looking at a gas price that is damaging his political standing agrees to a
minutes, secondstemporary halt in strikes. A ceasefire framework emerges through Qatar, through Oman, through whoever still has working diplomatic channels and functional
minutes, secondsembassies. The liquefaction trains at Ross Lafen begin damage assessments. Markets stabilize. The world exhales.
minutes, secondsVersion two, the IRGC fires again at Yanbu or at a Kuwait oil terminal or at something that crosses whatever threshold Trump has drawn. The threshold
minutes, secondsthat as of this morning has already been crossed with Ross Laughen and was answered not with overwhelming force but with a social media post. Iran reads that response as weakness. It escalates.
minutes, secondsTrump boxed in by his own public threat to destroy South Pars completely is forced to authorize strikes that permanently damage shared Iranian Qatari
minutes, secondsgeological infrastructure. Brent crude breaks $Europe enters recession.
minutes, secondsThe straight of Hormuz becomes a minefield. a US Navy vessel, possibly the USS Gerald R. Ford strike group operating in the region comes into
minutes, secondsdirect kinetic contact with IRGC naval assets and the war that started as a nuclear standoff between Israel and Iran becomes something that no architecture
minutes, secondsof diplomacy, no hallway and musket, no back channel text message and no social media threat can contain. That is the binary. That is the choice point. Deal or bombs, breakthrough or collapse,
minutes, secondspeace or the thing that comes after. The next hours will decide which future we are entering. And right now on the floor of the Intercontinental Exchange
minutesin London, that trader is still watching the TTF screen. It just printed He has not put the phone down because the
minutes, secondsone thing he knows, the one thing every energy analyst, every diplomat, every intelligence officer, and every general in that Persian Gulf theater knows is that the next missile, the next drone,
minutes, secondsthe next match dropped into this tinder box of broken infrastructure and fractured diplomacy will not land on a gas facility. It will land on the future.