links to Iran War-related material, 1-25 March 2026
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While exploring the many rabbit holes I've visited in the 3 weeks since our last Convivium (it was on 4iii26) It was clear that the Iran catastrophe has been at he forefront, and is indeed a whole warren of its own, and might be usefully viewed as a chronology of links and images collected. Here they are, extracted from March 26 general links collection, from 1iii26:
(some are paywalled, and I've made extensive extracts where needed)
Donald Trump famously hates stupid wars and claims to have set the record for ending wars in a presidential term. It's not the worst idea to wonder if he's starting the former so he can keep resetting the latter. If you're already a great fake businessman, you might as well be a great fake statesman. Smarter people than Trump would realize that, having come this far, you might as well fake the war too. In this respect, we bear witness to the rare instance of Iran, Greenland and Minnesota all having the same defense policy.
...Whether the enemy is Cuba, Minneapolis or a transgender person, the war is the purpose of the war. Its prizes are nihilism and hatred at best. No greater project awaits an armistice. There are only enemies, victories and different enemies. There is no strategy, because realizing the ostensible macro purpose of each war, besides having it, requires committing to an absurd and criminal totality, because their own rhetorical stakes have demonstrated that nothing less than an American Iran, an American Cuba, a transgender-free nation or a Minnesota with only the correct voters will be acceptable. Carried to their conclusions, you can do one of two things: exterminate the enemy or the treasury and destroy yourself as a nation.
...The prevailing wisdom thus far is that Trump is operating a protection racket disguised as a foreign policy — and, in a twist, as a domestic foreign policy. That's certainly part of it, as is the fascist need to obscure its incompetency by feeding its followers an illusion of constant action meeting an illusion of constant, variegated threats. The tempting term for the hegemony he seems to wish to impose is something like "vassalage," because it sounds like government instead of extortion. But vassalage was a reciprocally binding contract, which both sides were entitled to rescind in response to the other's broken faith, and it represents a degree of accountability that Trump's career of lawfare says does not apply to him.
In his gut, Trump is the preteen bully on the playground — more big bones and huskiness than muscle — who gets his snack freebies at recess by rearing back an arm, cocking a fist and letting everyone's imagination do the work for him. He has neither the first clue what to do if swinging becomes necessary, nor the slightest desire to find out, because it might hurt. He hasn't thought for a second about how he would maintain dominance day after day. The menacing fist exists to express the hate he thinks he's entitled to unleash and to generate the fear that he is owed. But the work ends there. Snacks are treats he gets as a reward for being his worst self, and it's hard to tell which is more satisfying, but this is also all that there is.
...Of the many forces sustaining Trumpism all this time, one of the strongest and most enduring is that everything is too stupid and humiliating to be real. The sheer effrontery of such a clownish machine is enough to keep the horror of what it does in abeyance until it starts to roll over the bodies.
...After the repetition of the war's pretexts has created space for the possible, after the easier lies are spent, after Trump the Scamp and his greedy feints at war stop paying off, the only thing left is the original cause, the long-awaited victims. All that is left then is the demented demand for the impossible and the criminal, one that must be met by total measures, and for which there is a waiting library of techniques of colonialism and repression and deprivation and, ultimately, extermination. When each runs out of lies to destroy, what is left is only ourselves, and what is lost of America in their application is total too.
(quoting Baudrillard) ...What characterizes consumer society is the universality of the news item [Ie fait divers] in mass communication. All political, historical and cultural information is received in the same - at once anodyne and miraculous — form of the news item. It is entirely actualized — i.e. dramatized in the spectacular mode — and entirely deactualized — i.e. distanced by the communication medium and reduced to signs. The news item is thus not one category among others, but the cardinal category of our magical thinking, of our mythology.
That mythology is buttressed by the all the more voracious demand for reality, for 'truth', for 'objectivity'. Everywhere we find 'cinema-verite', live reporting, the newsflash, the high-impact photo, the eye-witness report, etc. Everywhere what is sought is the 'heart of the event', the 'heart of the battle', the 'live', the 'face to face' - the dizzy sense of a total presence at the event, the Great Thrill of Lived Reality — i.e. the miracle once again, since the truth of the media report, televised and taped, is precisely that I was not there. But it is the truer than true which counts or, in other words, the fact of being there without being there. Or, to put it yet another way, the fantasy.
What mass communications give us is not reality, but the dizzying whirl of reality [Ie vertige de la realite]. Or again, without playing on words, a reality without the dizzying whirl, for the heart of Amazonia, the heart of reality, the heart of passion, the heart of war, this 'Heart' which is the locus of mass communications and which gives them their vertiginous sentimentality, is precisely the place where nothing happens. It is the allegorical sign of passion and of the event. And signs are sources of security.
So we live, sheltered by signs, in the denial of the real. A miraculous security: when we look at the images of the world, who can distinguish this brief irruption of reality from the profound pleasure of not being there? The image, the sign, the message — all these things we 'consume' — represent our tranquillity consecrated by distance from the world, a distance more comforted by the allusion to the real (even where the allusion is violent) than compromised by it.
(Tooze resumes) ...Do we live in a world in which the question of popular legitimation for war, or the legality of Trump's actions — the classic questions still posed by war-making in the period between Vietnam and Iraq and implicitly answered by Baudrillard — still matter very much any more?
As Stephen Wertheim points out, there was zero preparation of the American public for this conflict. What is by any stretch of the imagination a major military action seems entirely divorced from American politics in any conventional sense.
...Donald Trump is not a reliable narrator. No one in the Trump administration is a reliable narrator. Plus the U.S. these days cannot be understood, even as shorthand, to be a unitary actor with coherent objectives. It is chaos monkeys all the way down.
Trump has offered no endgame: there are no articulated conditions for success beyond the fall of the regime, no explanation of what follows if Iran fragments or descends into civil war, and no domestic debate rallying support comparable to 2002-03. What's next?. Every sortie, carrier deployment, and Patriot battery shifted to the Gulf is something not available for deterring Russia in Eastern Europe or China in the Western Pacific. How big will the strain be on U.S. readiness in Asia ? This war is a gamble, taken with incomplete information and in the teeth of historical experience that suggests such gambles often go badly—above all for the people living under the bombs.
... The war is now a multi-node regional air and missile war. Inside Iran, the regime has moved—remarkably quickly, given the shock—to institutionalize succession.
...Pause for the Strait of Hormuz at the entrance to the Persian/Arabian Gulf. 1000 miles to the west-southwest, the Houthis succeeded in their operational aim: closing the Bab el-Mandeb at the southern end of the Red Sea and convincing the U.S. Navy that continued retaliatory strikes attrit the U.S. Navy more than Houthi capabilities. They did this for nearly two years until the October 2025 ceasefire. They exploited the asymmetry between how much it cost them to keep shooting, how much it cost the U.S. Navy to suppress their capabilities, and how much it costs everyone else to keep sailing. The Houthis are now doing again, as MAERSK reroutes away from the Suez Canal to the Cape of Good Hope. Only a sliver of the 20 mb/d of oil that transits the Strait of Hormuz has pipeline alternatives. An Omani-via-land bridge is OK for high-value but not for bulk commodities. Thus adding enough stochastic risk to effectively close the Strait of Hormuz may be possible even for a substantially degraded Islamic Republic military.
...Since the 1970s, US administrations have progressively opted for illegal wars and unilateralism at the expense of international law and multilateralism. What is new is that today all gloves are off. The deployment of brutal force is open, blatant and unapologetic. Since might is right, any criticism must be regarded as potential subversion.
Moreover, these strikes against Iran are not just about the Middle East. They are a prelude — a demonstration effect toward China/Taiwan and Russia/Ukraine theaters.
Overnight, the Trump administration, once again without an exit strategy, managed to drag the international community ever closer to a Cold War escalation.
...I often dream about trying to tell my parents (who died in 1977 and 1983) about this world of ours and You Know Who. But there would honestly be no way to do so. If they were to appear now, I'd be at a complete loss and, in any case, they would never believe me. Whatever I told them would, from the perspective of their ancient American world, seem like the most ludicrous form of fiction imaginable, not even a good (or bad) joke. A president like Donald J. Trump? Dream on.
...Despite this ever eerier present we're now living through, it might only be my grim fantasy of our future. Even Donald J. Trump might not be able to literally flip the American system on its ass. But given what we've gone through so far, don't count on it not happening either.
And, of course, we're not just talking about the man who wants to flip the system on its butt, we're talking about the guy who seems all too intent on doing the same thing to planet Earth. Someday, Donald Trump may be known as the end-times president, since he and his Republican confederates (and I use that word advisedly) seem remarkably intent on ensuring that this planet will indeed become a hellhole for our children and grandchildren.
...In short, President Trump remains remarkably intent on fossil-fuelizing our climate (and us) to death. Just the other week, in fact, he announced that, as the New York Times reported, he was "erasing the scientific finding that climate change endangers human health and the environment, ending the federal government's legal authority to control the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet... a key step in removing limits on carbon dioxide, methane, and four other greenhouse gases that scientists say are supercharging heat waves, droughts, wildfires, and other extreme weather." And count on this: for the next three years, that's only the beginning when it comes to the president who has all too bluntly called the very idea that climate change might be a threat to public health "a scam."
...in 1978 Iran didn't account for a large share of world oil production either. So why did world oil prices rise 165 percent after the Iranian Revolution? Fears of disruption in other Middle Eastern nations led to speculative hoarding, followed by Saudi production cuts that kept prices high. The lesson for today is that when assessing the impact of events in Iran on world oil markets, we need to consider the impact on exports from Iran's neighbors.
...As of this morning, oil prices were about $10 a barrel higher than they were in mid-February. That will add approximately 25 cents to the price of a gallon of gasoline. So far markets are in effect betting on a short, not-too-disruptive war, although that could change.
...one point I haven't seen many observers emphasize is that the modern Middle East now plays an important role in the world economy that goes beyond its status as a major source of oil. Dubai in particular is an important node in the global financial system, as well as playing host to many extremely rich people who thought they had found a safe haven. One indicator of that changing status is the transformation of Dubai International Airport into one of the world's most important travel hubs.
The United States Secretary of "War," Whiskey Pete Hegseth, has proudly declared that this war will not be "politically correct." The United States will adhere to "no stupid rules of engagement." No "nation-building quagmire." This is not a "democracy building exercise." Just "winning," in the most Charlie Sheen interpretation possible. America is unburdened by complexity or morality. What they are calling "Operation Epic Fury" is really just "Operation F Things Up."
...This is a war being run as a content pipeline. You don't articulate objectives. You declare vibes. There is no defined victory. The promise to "fight to win" may sound tough to Whiskey Pete, but it provides no calm for worried families of service members sent into this quagmire. Just say you have "generals" and take the next question.
Rules of engagement aren't "stupid." They exist because war has terrible consequences: civilian casualties, retaliatory strikes, regional spillover, international law, and the small matter of US armed service people getting sucked into endless cycles of retaliation. Discarding long-accepted RoE isn't a show of strength. It's branding. It's dangerous and opens the doors to all sorts of awful behavior.
"No nation building," he says. What replaces it? Containment? Deterrence? Regime change? Strategic degradation? Negotiation leverage? The doctrine is literally and only: break things loudly.
Donald Trump has taken America into war with a country whose population is approximately the size of Iraq's and Afghanistan's combined. He has done this without making a case to the American people, and without approval of any kind from their elected representatives. His launching of hostilities (with the embarrassingly bro-themed name "Operation Epic Fury") is the culmination of decades of expanding presidential powers over national-security issues, and Trump has now taken that expansion to its extreme conclusion, launching wars and using military power as he sees fit.
Many of his critics are focused on the claim that the war is illegal under both U.S. and international law—and they are probably right about that. But Trump has already floored the accelerator and driven off the cliff. What are the options for Congress and the American people—the majority of whom do not support this conflict—to regain some control over a president conducting a war as if he were a medieval prince?
Unfortunately, the few legal options available are laden with their own risks. Congress could decide to cut off funding for the war, which at this point could be as reckless an act as starting one. Men and women overseas did not choose to go, and they should at least be allowed to conduct their operations without worrying that Congress will simply turn off all funding. It could pass a resolution demanding an immediate end to hostilities—aalso a risky move.
..."The temptation is strong to obey powerful men passively and unquestioningly," Ellsberg observed in 1971, the year he turned himself in for giving the Pentagon Papers to the press and faced the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison.
He instantly became a pariah among colleagues who'd been his friends at the RAND Corporation, a think tank serving the U.S. war machine. He'd been working there as a strategic analyst before and after a stint at the Defense Department.
"After I released the papers," he vividly remembered, "some people were afraid to write to me . . . to shake hands with me . . . to receive a phone call from me." Three years later, his takeaway was: "Accept the risks of freedom and commitment, instead of the risks of obedience and conformity."
...By the time Ellsberg suddenly found himself vilified and beloved for releasing the Pentagon Papers in 1971, he was a devotee of civil disobedience. "Use of a radical, novel, powerful, and possibly illegal tactic of nonviolence," he wrote that year, "is a form of useful work that is perfectly suited to illustrate the evil being combated."
...In many cases, Europeans leveraged their shipborne weaponry and navigational technologies to act as nautical bandits who demanded a ransom from merchant ships in the Indian Ocean and Western Pacific but did not exert meaningful territorial force over more than small outposts that they essentially rented from local sovereigns who were perfectly capable of thwarting any attempt at territorial conquest. We collapse the end of this period of European expansion, when there were accelerating territorial inroads, when early industrialization began to be a force multiplier, when New World settlements were fully given over to slavery and the plantation complex, with the long centuries prior to that, when European sovereigns faced many regimes that were their peers as well as many smaller polities that were capable of thwarting most intrusions into their territory.
...The empire of the air that Trump and his people have now unleashed against Venezuela and Iran and doubtless wish to uncork elsewhere cannot exert any kind of direct administrative power within those territories. It is not empire in any old sense, even if some of them think it is, even if the news analysts see it as such. It is banditry. It is the demanding of tribute without even the offer of future protection.
...Trump's form of empire is decapitationist. You pay him, you get to live, your palace still stands, your major city doesn't get a light dusting of random munitions, and maybe a few fishermen get to come home with their catch. Venezuela was, under Maduro, more or less a gatekeeper state, though relatively little came through its gates in either direction. You can claim a tribute through decapitating Venezuela's regime because its structure of rule is effectively personalist, its sovereign cares relatively little for its people.
It won't be much of a tribute: if the mafioso really wants that oil, it's going to have to go in and rebuild a system for extracting it. The big corporations aren't going to do that because helping a decapitationist regime is all risk, no reward for them. They know how to pay their steady rents to a gatekeeper, but putting a lot of money into helping an unstable gangster collect his payday—particularly one known for not paying people who do him a service—is for small fry, not for multi-bazillion dollar multinationals. Maybe there's a mere multimillionaire hick who owns a couple of oil wells who might be interested, good luck.
Iran is not a state you can easily decapitate, by comparison. It's an ideological state. It has built its deepest bunkers not in the form of hardened concrete but in terms of loyalists: judges, police, soldiers, theocratic militia. It is not a personalist state, no matter what the org chart might seem to say.
...You cannot run a decapitationist empire on a hydra. Nor, paradoxically, can you easily collect tribute from a wealthy target. Iran has a lot of oil, but Iran's oil production matters to many other actors besides Iran, and most of them wouldn't stand for a mafioso saying it all belongs to him now. Trump can have Venezuela's oil if he can con his way into getting someone to rebuild the capacity, because nobody except Cuba is all that dependent on it. China has other places to buy from.
...Susan Glasser took a stab at listing the ever-fluctuating reasons for sending men and women to die, while spending billions of dollars:
[O]utright regime change, assistance to the oppressed peoples of the Islamic Republic, stripping Iran of "the ability to project power outside its borders," stopping future Iranian-sponsored terrorist attacks while exacting revenge for past ones, preemptive action against an imminent Iranian threat to attack U.S. forces, preemptive action to block Iran from building ballistic missiles that could hit the U.S. mainland, and preemptive action to stop the Iranian nuclear program that Trump had, as recently as last week, claimed was "obliterated." Many of these explanations are based on false premises; some already seem to have been abandoned.
You hear the phrase "the cruelty is the point" a lot these days, but the war in Iran is revealing the darkest iteration of it. The proof is in a smirking Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth saying, in an on-camera interview, "The only ones that need to be worried right now are Iranians that think they're gonna live."
The phrasing is from the heart (as twisted and rotted as it is) and deliberate. Not "who think" but "that think”" like they are less than human. Not "Iranian forces" but "Iranians" because he doesn't care if they are combatants or citizens; this isn't even a sort-of-pragmatic "collateral damage is inevitable" but rather a desire to kill anyone in Iran.
Petey is a damn psychopath. He's loving the power and authority to deal out death at will.
He is telling us that "politically correct" rules of warfare won't be utilized (in other words, violating the Geneva Convention and committing war crimes in general are now standard operating procedure) and gleefully using words like "death from the skies" and "complete destruction without mercy."
The president smiles on camera like a man savoring the notion of a soon-to-occur steamy sexual liaison as he says, "I have to go back and look at the war; there's a lot going on."
...Under international law, aggression is not just another war crime—it is the gravest crime of all. The judges at the Nuremberg Trials called aggression "the supreme international crime," because it "contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." Those convicted of launching aggressive war were held responsible for all the horrors that followed. For that reason, the Nuremberg tribunal reserved its harshest punishment—death by hanging—for the defendants convicted of planning and waging aggressive war, while those found guilty only of war crimes or crimes against humanity received lesser sentences.
...The role of the sovereign wealth funds of the Gulf sheikdoms in global finance means that financial markets will be further impacted as they dip into those funds to make up for the lost revenue from the disruption of their oil and gas exports.
...Israel and Iran face an existential choice between gradually destroying each other and accepting that they must learn to co-exist in the same region of the world. The United States government must decide which of those choices it will support.
"Everyone saw this coming except the President." An "unmitigated disaster of epic proportions." Were these the words from Democrats decrying Donald Trump for failing to plan to evacuate hundreds of thousands of civilians under a blizzard of retaliatory fire raining down on the Gulf States? No, those were Republicans excoriating former president Joe Biden for the botched 2021 exit from Afghanistan. Back then, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) thundered, "It's a very dire situation when you see the United States Embassy being evacuated."
Fast forward to last week. The Trump regime closed down three of our embassies (Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Kuwait), abandoning U.S. citizens in those countries. Trump's minions failed to consider advanced planning to evacuate Americans from the region, leaving them to fend for themselves in places where missiles are flying and buildings are ablaze.
Story after story has documented Americans scared, stranded, and left to find their own transportation out of countries made dangerous by his careless whims. Many have expressed their understandably fury that their government could be so derelict. The State Department has failed spectacularly in one of its essential missions — protecting Americans around the world.
The Trump regime's level of recklessness and indifference to human life and international order should appall all Americans. Trump's excuse for making no evacuation plans — "Well, because it happened all very quickly" — is ludicrous, considering the U.S. and Israel apparently spent months planning the military assault. His jaw-dropping admission that Iran's bombardment of neighboring countries in retaliation was "probably the biggest surprise" reflects how little thought he put into a war with global ramifications.
...This display of incompetence should not surprise us, given that the MAGA crew harbors such contempt for government. The massive cuts and loss of scores of foreign policy professionals (collectively representing centuries of experience) mean institutional knowledge is scarce. DOGE cuts conducted by know-nothing twenty year olds, partisan witch hunts, early retirements, and mass resignations have hollowed out the State Department, leaving it in the hands of a skeletal staff retained for their political loyalty — not expertise and experience. (Rubio also slashed staff at the National Security Council, which is supposed to oversee interagency planning.) In any other administration, the secretary of state/national security adviser would get canned or forced to resign in disgrace after such management malpractice.
...Congress must rouse itself to focus on a foreign policy disaster that makes the Iraq War look like a masterstroke. Rubio and other top officials under oath and in public should answer for their lapses, account for every dime spent, and give Congress some basic information. (What is the plan to extract Americans? When does the war end? Are we now targeting civilians?) The last thing Congress should do is agree to any request, as the Trump team is reportedly contemplating, to shovel more money into the coffers of this gang of bumblers.
Unfortunately, we know how this will play out. Trump and his arrogant yes-men will never admit error, let alone apologize; Republicans on the Hill will not stir themselves to do their jobs. It will be up to the voters to throw out every elected Republican and force removal of the architects of this catastrophe. Until that happens, Americans here and abroad will needlessly suffer and die.
In the near term, we can see that a major cause of the job downturn is Trump's mass deportation scheme. "The latest numbers show that net migration into the United States fell by more than half, and that reality is now reflected in the latest employment report," the Center for American Progress found. Moreover, "native-born workers haven't seen their wages or employment prospects rise under this new immigration approach." CAP explained: "Immigration is the driving force behind America's labor supply growth, accounting for about half of labor force growth each year for the past three decades and an even larger share in recent years." When you have declining birth rates and choke off immigrants, who have higher job participation, then "negative job growth could become the new normal, according to some estimates."
...Now, Trump has launched an unnecessary, open-ended war that threatens to shock the entire global economy. "Any event that extends the conflict or threatens sources of oil and gas is likely to lift energy prices to levels that would sow inflation. That could prompt central banks worldwide to raise interest rates, pushing up the costs of mortgages, car loans, and other borrowing," the New York Times reported. "And that would choke off consumer spending and business investment — a classic pathway to a downturn." In a written statement, Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA) explained, "Already under strain from the President's disastrous trade war and anti-immigrant crusade, our economy is extremely ill-prepared to deal with yet another wave of Trump-induced chaos, this time in the form of an illegal war of choice in the Middle East which is rapidly driving up energy prices across the globe." But Trump seems incapable of doing anything other than making matters worse. His ever-changing rationale for the war and lengthening timeline create more volatility. His inane comment that we would accept only "unconditional surrender" (are we planning a land invasion to take by force a country of over 90 million people?) spooked the oil markets. Perhaps when oil prices soar above $150 per barrel, his party will revolt.
Britons stranded abroad when war breaks out can usually expect a dose of sympathy from their countrymen. When Iranian drones and missiles started to crash into Dubai, Britain instead let out a collective cackle. Had British expats not consulted a map before they extolled Dubai as the safest city in the world? "Extraordinary images here of an expat in Dubai having their first ever geopolitical thought," read one cartoon in the Guardian, "the dawning realisation that there might be something in the world beyond his dickhead self."
...Many of the fragments spreading through the digital panopticon comprise real footage of real events, but their cumulative effect is far from a cogent portrait. Instead, it's something like what the French philosopher Paul Virilio, in his 1998 book "The Information Bomb,' labelled a coming "visual crash": a "real-time globalization of telecommunications" in which any significant event in the world is live-streamed and broadcast, and the overflow of detail causes a "defeat of facts" and a "disorientation of our relation to reality."
...Virilio's information-bomb concept applies beyond warfare. Online, every day, we are inundated with evidence of emergencies, crimes, and conspiracies that seem to elude comprehension. A driverless Waymo vehicle blocks an ambulance headed to the site of a mass shooting in Austin. Bill Clinton seems to laugh while paging through documents during his recent deposition on the Jeffrey Epstein files. Meanwhile, anyone online can browse Epstein's correspondence on Jmail, a site that emulates the experience of browsing his Gmail inbox. Early this month, zoomed-in press cameras captured a creeping rash on President Trump's neck, adding to a growing archive of his unexplained medical symptoms or injuries. Once the information bomb has detonated, even reality takes on the feeling of conspiracy.
...As American journalistic institutions are consolidated and politicized by tech billionaires seeking to dominate the industry, those who consume news on the internet are increasingly left to assemble the disparate pieces on their own. Thankfully, there's a meme to describe that, too: "Monitoring the situation," an ironic phrase popularized on X and elsewhere during Trump's strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities last year. It describes the social-media user's manic scramble to follow every update at once, as if each of us might have a role to play in shaping outcomes, if only we knew enough about what was going on. We monitor the situation out of a deluded belief that we are more than just passive, confused bystanders to a spray of digital shrapnel.
...I can remember when we first started talking, there were alarmist reports that all of our media was controlled by eight corporations. We may be going towards one. We've become more and more of an oligarchy, both with regard to socioeconomic affairs and with regard to media. When we started talking, Facebook didn't yet exist, and Twitter has now become X, with algorithms that suppress things they don't like — they suppress news, they suppress controversial postings. The media landscape is very murky. Back in the Iraq war days, I could go on the internet and look at local Iraqi newspapers from towns in Iraq. I find it difficult to do that in Iran because they're also highly controlled. It is a very different situation, and I think it's because our politics has shifted so heavily towards oligarchy.
...I think the overall picture of what's going on is not so hard to discern. The United States and Israel are bombing the bejesus out of Iran. They are attempting to inflict attrition on Iranian drone and missile launchers in order to make the country helpless, and they haven't succeeded. Moreover, Iran has figured out a strategy — it may be somewhat self-defeating, but also an effective one — of not only hitting at Israel or at US bases, but of interfering with the commerce in petroleum and gas that comes out of the Persian Gulf, which could throw the whole world into a deep recession.
...The Israelis think in ethnic terms and they hope to break Iran up ethnically, as they hoped to break Iraq up ethnically. But 90% of the country is Shiite, and it's unlikely that appealing to small Sunni ethnicities like the Kurds or the Baluch is going to do more than cause some local turbulence of a minor sort. Doing that also brings in the neighbors, because Turkey is not going to be happy with a Kurdish resurgence in Iran, and Pakistan is petrified of the Baluch rising up because they'll rise up on both sides of the border. All you're doing is giving Iran allies if you take that approach.
...In Iran, attacks on civilian infrastructure have created environmental disasters of catastrophic proportions. The bombing of oil storage facilities in Tehran and other Iranian cities has unleashed environmental crises that will affect generations. These attacks on civilian infrastructure — desalination plants, oil facilities, media outlets, public utilities, among many others — represent clear violations of international humanitarian law and are also met with little repercussions on the aggressors.
Article 54 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions explicitly prohibits attacks on objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, including foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations, and irrigation works.
...What we are witnessing is not just the escalation of conflict; it is the death of international law as a meaningful constraint, however limited, on powerful states. When war crimes are announced in advance and committed openly, when civilian displacement becomes a stated objective, and when environmental destruction is treated as collateral damage, we have moved beyond the realm of legal gray areas into a world where might makes right.
...The normalization of these war crimes has created a dangerous precedent — or return to a tradition of brutal colonialism — that could be applied anywhere, anytime, yet again. When powerful states can act with impunity, when they can announce their intentions to commit atrocities and then follow through without consequence, the entire framework of international law becomes meaningless, even as a smokescreen.
Hi, Paul Krugman with an update at about noon on Sunday. Like everyone paying any attention, I'm very focused on the war. which is going badly. It's enough that I'm a little concerned about how it's going to disrupt daily life, even for those of us who are, by most measures,
extremely insulated from all of that. This is looking really, really bad. How did this happen?
Now, we talk a lot about the specifics of Trump and we talk about the motivations of people involved but what is really striking gets all of us is how utterly utterly unprepared the
administration was for the kind of obviously at least possible consequences of going to war in the persian gulf how could they have been so blind Well, if you look at what the rhetoric that Donald Trump uses and continues to use even in the face of all of this,
one thing that always strikes you is how he continues to insist that everything is going great and everything is going according to plan. So just on Thursday, he said, once again, I think he's used the words exactly the same words many occasions, but he said in a speech, inflation is plummeting, incomes are rising,
the economy is roaring back, and America is respected again. Now, as we all point out, none of that is true. Inflation is not plummeting. In fact, the latest numbers show it ticking up, which was not what people expected before Trump took office. The economy is definitely not roaring back.
Now,
the last growth numbers were probably artificially weak because of the effects of the shutdown, but it's not a roaring economy. Job growth has been virtually zero for the past year, so this is not a great economy. And this persistent delusion that America is [not] respected because Trump is there, which
I'm probably going to write about that so I don't want to spend too much time on it, but it's utterly, utterly not true. Of all the things he just said, that's probably the most at odds with reality. We have probably never been as despised, held in contempt as we are right now.
But what strikes me about all of this is that Trump has been able to keep peddling this fantasy about how well things are going on his watch. And although polls say that the public isn't buying it, the consequences for this kind of delusional thinking have been, for him so far, pretty minimal. It's kind of,
you can keep on doing, keep on claiming that things are going great, and certainly nobody immediately around him is going to tell him that it ain't so.
And so I found myself thinking about an essay of George Orwell's. Now, I've read a lot of Orwell over the years, and there's the, There are many great oral writings.
It's not just 1984 and Animal Farm. But he had an essay just written shortly after World War II ended called In Front of Your Nose about people's capacity to delude themselves. And there was a line in there. in which he talked about this, how even when things are very much not what you said was going to happen,
you can keep on telling yourself, particularly, of course, if you're a person in power, a person surrounded by sycophants, which we're seeing at a drastic level for Trump, that you can just keep on telling yourself. about how things are going, maybe even persuade some people to believe them until at some point you can't.
And here is the line from Orwell. He said, the point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue. And then when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time.
The only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.
I think I'm just going to leave it there.
[the concluding sentences of In Front of Your Nose: ...In private life most people are fairly realistic. When one is making out one's weekly budget, two and two invariably make four. Politics, on the other hand, is a sort of sub-atomic or non-Euclidean world where it is quite easy for the part to be greater than the whole or for two objects to be in the same place simultaneously. Hence the contradictions and absurdities I have chronicled above, all finally traceable to a secret belief that one's political opinions, unlike the weekly budget, will not have to be tested against solid reality.]
...Hobbes' useful tripartite division of ‘why we attack' — the three causes of quarrel in human 'nature' laid out in the thirteenth chapter of Leviathan. In this post, I've decided to cover the first two, in the order I take them: first glory, then competition.
This is because I think the third one, diffidence — mutual mistrust, the distrust of all by all — merits its own whole post, which I'll follow up with as soon as I have time. Diffidence is surely the basal structure of feeling gripping the world now, regardless of whether our analysis then hews to Hobbes and talks about fear (Davies), anger and ressentiment (Mishra), or anxiety (Neumann).
...And the World Enters The Funny Zone: the globalisation and rationalisation of 3SD (surreal, stubborn, stupid; dangerous, destructive, dumb)
So yes, here we are in full-blown stage four 3SD 2026, in which it's just true:
"this unstable guy (is) carrying out a war for some unknown reason that no one can figure out, and... this whole set of rules that we have from the middle of the twentieth century is absurd to talk about."
So if we're done with laws of war and international criminal and humanitarian law, what then? Next topic? Here's Tom with the weather..."
And yet... we are now — all — in The Funny Zone because of this lapsus, aren't we: 3D's dumb dangerous destructive ramps up, then 3S' stubbornly stupid slides everyday life further over into the surreal.
Middle class life outside this month's war zones continues to chug along in its involuted somehow, in a shrinking zone of coverage, with more sand in the gears, more onerous cost of living pressures, more disorientation and shrinking hope.
...The Funny Zone is this weird — surreal, stubborn — realm in which words fail and words proliferate, or where the truth is spoken for a moment, like the bubble of a bath fart, then we revert to habitually telling each other lies and disavowing what's going on. Reasons are explicated, reasoning is adduced: some kind of Papier-maché sense of the whole is induced.. the spectacle of bombardment perforce unfolds, real people do get bombed in their thousands, and Bibi continues to dom the region via his unchecked schoolyard bully routine, instead of standing trial on his criminal charges. Bibi: he is very much 'at large', isn't he. But in the Funny Zone, 'we' still don't think these could be our kids getting bombed by US ordinance, we still think it's out of reach of us and the people we love, don't we.
...the idea that 'playing dumb' somehow protects us all, that stupidity, a kind of bimbo pretence, has some kind of prophylactic value for all of us. In this global ostriching, as long as we know as little as possible about Hormuz, and Caracas, and the acceleration of the land grab in the West Bank, if we just ignore it or diminish it or make it clear it's 'not chill' when someone raises the topic, then we're safe, and we can go back to blathering about our real estate, long haul travel, fine dining, home renovations...
...So then, what if we *did* stop pretending ... what would we know very well?
We know very well that Iran isn't really about Iran — and yet we have Iran.
We know very well that Venezuela wasn't about Venezuela, and yet, that happened…
and it disappeared down the memory hole: barely remembered, although it was six weeks ago.
We know very well that Greenland (remember Greenland?; you will!) is not really to do with Greenland — and yet we will have Greenland, or Trump will have Greenland, at some point, and then Greenland will have Trump and his entourage of cartoon villains and schoolyard bullies kicking its prone and rubbery head and body, just as we will have Cuba getting stomped in the guts while down (its people already starving), at some time later this year.
'Stay tuned...' Monitor the situation... &c
We know very well that, on the hegemon's side, this resplendent stupidity is completely unchecked and uncontrollable, for the moment. We know this. Planet Earth is blue — and there's nothing we can do. And we also know that the Trump regime is basically running around looking for unsympathetic regimes who on their knees that they can just kick and kick and kick.
We know this because Hegseth just said it directly:
"This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it isn't... We are punching them while they are down."
Yes, it's a funny zone, The Funny Zone. Full of cartoon villains and schoolyard bullies.
...In The Funny Zone, we are subsisting in a moral and existential voidtime of strategic prolapse, a global spectacle whose main event is a simulated gigantomachy between petty, vengeful, emotionally immature egotists who have no regard for the world or other people, cannot care for people or institutions, cannot think, never move outside their own reactivity — and don't have a plan
...And these domineering styles of stupidity, as I've been trying to track, are stupefying when weaponised and deployed against the whole world in bad faith: opponents' words fail, we get pipiked, then we are confounded, deprived of moral seriousness and good reasons — the gentle, subtle and substantive is relegated to NPC, the shallow, unconvincing, and grotesque are globo-goatsemaxxed to Main Character Energy.
...where domination co-mingles with domineering stupidity this *is* the big chunky 'bombing you now' part of the point; it was-and-is always how schoolyard bully domination works. The point is just to dominate, to punch people in the guts and steal their lunch money, to be a mean, cruel asshole knowing the person you're victimising can't hurt you back the way you keep hurting them, and enjoy continuing to hurt and terrorise them. Once you add in Bibi's unchecked warmongering and bloodlust, you probably have enough of a read on 'why Iran is happening'.
...In this famous passage from the thirteenth chapter of Leviathan, Hobbes adduces three basic causes of quarrel in human nature:
So that in the nature of man, we find three principal causes of quarrel.
The first makes men invade for gain; the second, for safety; and the third, for reputation.
The first use violence to make themselves masters of other men's persons, wives, children, and cattle; the second, to defend them; the third, for trifles, as a word, a smile, a different opinion, and any other sign of undervalue, either direct in their persons or by reflection in their kindred, their friends, their nation, their profession, or their name.
...we are in this Funny Zone where there's this orange guy who can do all kinds of things. Most of them are unlawful, immoral, unconscionable, stupid, and very consequential — you may have heard of him, and have thoughts and feelings of your own. He grabs the whole world by the pussy, like he warned us he was gonna, yet nobody does anything, none of our leaders (except Pedro from Spain) say fuck all about it.
...attacking Iran, or attacking anyone anywhere for any apparently stupid/insufficient reason, is about clicks and likes and shits and giggles, it's the involution of our infinite jest, as we amuse ourselves to death. This is spectacle (Debord), this is simulation (Baudrillard), this is deadly entertaining (Postman). And what do we do? We like and follow, we are 'monitoring the situation'.
...in such a milieu, everything substantive and prudent can be chucked out, nothing careful or subtle survives, and above all, the most angering, outrageous, dickhead behaviour 'wins'. The clicktatorship is a dicktatorship, which is why Trump and Hegseth and Rubio &c &c are all such dicks. And we love it. Trump is more entertaining than Biden was; you could tell how 'relieved' news media was when the T bag one again.
...we can think of this mob as 'Glory Clowns' — and this speaks to their cartoon villain aspects. Whenever they have the joker, the play the joker; they method act the Joker. We then move from the street parade scene in Burton's Batman to a world afflicted as The Dark Knight put it: 'welcome to a world without rules'.
...In the case of a veritable Trump, a true world historical Glory Clown, the real danger here is closer to Fromm's idea of the 'marketing orientation': a person who is entirely transactional, always peddling, wheeling and dealing and grabbing pussy as he can, because everything and everyone (including and above all 'personal brand') is just-only a commodity to be snatched and exploited.
Glory Clowns subsisting in the marketing orientation have no relation to truth or morality. This makes Trump (and his ilk) the kind of haute charlatan who don't understand (or have any care about) what's wrong with how they operate. This means they are (thus) capable of doing things that most people would balk at as unconscionable. Ordinary guilt-and-shame riddled people, from our cage of inhibitions, call such people 'brazen' and 'shameless', but these words contain moral condemnations of states of being that are foreign to the marketing orientation's fundamental mode of relatedness.
...The grand irony of 'all of the above' is that a specific — and uncontrollable — agency emerges from this: uninhibited by ordinary compunctions, they are very capable of unhesitatingly 'doing' a bunch of stuff that you or I just would never dream of doing to other people. Attacking Iran for no substantive reason is the least of it; it's just one transaction of many to come.
Dangerously for all of us, Glory Clowns get ahead. all the more so in conditions of involution where people crave the clear voice of a 'strong leader'. Berlusconi was the ultimate proto Trump Glory Clown; Bolsonaro, and especially Milei, are regionally significant Glory Clowns. This is also because not only are they disinhibited by viewing the world-and-people as commodity objects to get pimped and pumped, they also tend to be ego maniacs, so profoundly centred around an — always inflated and endangered — self, that they will say and do anything to achieve their glory.
...As Hobbes noticed, this means that they attack 'for trifles': any perceived slight, any endangerment of rep, anything that can be perceived as a diss, no matter how petty (especially if petty), activates a boundless wish for Attack, for limitless revenge.
In such a mode, it's also that everything is personal, because every moment is comprised in relation to the defence and entrenchement of one's huge ego, continually exposed to the massive threat of endangerment. The Glory Clown who attacks for trifles reads the world as either a commodity-object to be totally exploited, or a potential imminent total threat. Thus every entity is either a potential total donor to the ego, or it is a looming total threat that can and must — 'regardless' — be pre-emptively annihilated.
Tragically for anyone within his radius of stupidity (which is by now global) this means that Glory Clowns can be very easily manipulated behind the scenes — by a Bannon, or an assiduous lobby group, or by the cannier among their backroom tactician handlers.
I think this speaks directly to why there's no strategy.
...Truly, yet another country is being bombed for trifles, because of the egoic vanity of an a very insecure, emotionally immature, narcissistic Glory Clown, forever just pimping his own personal brand and business interest, all for clicks and likes and shits and giggles.
It's yucky to realise this is the state of the world from this perspective, yet here we are
...But there aren't too many Glory Clowns: not many of us get to scale the empyrean heights and achieve such clowning glory10. So, sadly, living through the Funny Zone means we have Glory Clowns in High Places, and, as I've just explored, this does amount to meaning that Trump can very easily be pulled right down into Bibi's dirty little regional war in a way that is destablising the whole global economy over trifles.
However, just below the Glory Clowns, and feeding them all kinds of glory offers and 'rumours of being slighted' that can goad them into attacking for trifles, there's a venerable intra-institutional dynamic in the mix that is fundamentally about ruthless competition.
In these realms, groups of people you've never heard of are scheming away in the background, on the downlow, jockeying for suction, traction, faction and position, in ways that lead to the kind of dominance that will play well in the division of spoils.
In these realms, it's not as if we leave ego and vanity behind, but the game is more about expediency, pragmatic flexibility, the ruthless running of the numbers, the pitiless seeking of advantage
...In instituted politics, we can see the cumulative-collective effects of this most of all in the group chats of staffers around ministers, those hyperactive hive minds that — dangerously — are both hall of mirrors and pinball machine around the Glory Clowns (or pusimaxxing beanbags) they serve.
...one is in the realm of Ianucci-style 'satire', filled with ruthless manipulation, zero sum hardball, and pointy stabby Machiavellianism. In the back end, competitive individuals are stabbing each other in the back end, in a world of knifey discourse, where Glory Clowns come and go.
...we suspect manipulation because, indeed, there are groups conspiring. Less to do with ‘nefarious control' and more to do with stitching things up. More like Cambridge Analytica and the Andreesen groups than Epstein – though latter also exists, doesn't it, as did PC Houthi Small Group.)
Most of those who thrive in these groups work 80-100 hours a week, they have no hobbies, are usually divorced, have terrible boundaries, and would kill you, or have you killed, to get ahead in their game. Among their kind are (Glory Clowns and beanbags notwithstanding) the worst bosses many of us have had: taking breaks is a sign of weakness, showing feeling is a sign of weakness, caring for someone or something is a sign of weakness. Even your mum's cancer was a sign of weakness; 'that's why you were sacked — because you were weak and didn't take this seriously enough'. In other words, the people who thrive in these ruthless intragroup fields of competition succumb to a loss of perspective that leads to the loss of basic humanity for which they're perennially famous — with the collateral damage of their sense of humour, proportion, and spacious appreciation for a broader context in which 'none of this matters'.
In the course of becoming hardbitten playaz, the world and other people disappear, and only the game and its tactics and state of play exist. Ball don't lie, ball don't bawl, ball only balls.
To bring in Hobbes' 'reasons for attack' here, those driven by competition attack for gain. They're there to grab an advantage. So, if they think it is in their interest (or their group's interest), they'll nab your job, your "wives, children, and cattle", just as they'll bomb your institutions, your desal plant, or whatever.
For such groups, every Glory Clown is something between a Trojan Horse and a puppet, and the front of house is just a spectacle who can be 'puppeted'. The point is to stitch it all up in favour of your faction, hog tie 'the competition', and... Well, what exactly? What then; now what?
This speaks — again — to the absence of strategy.
As I get older and I see more people who become successful in institutional life by operating in this way, the more I notice that they seldom actually 'win'. In chess terms, they're all mid game, and no end game. Ruthless playaz are masterful tacticians within strict game logics. To this extent, they are perennially embroiled in ‘moves', so there never comes a point where things are clinched, let alone is there ever an 'off season' where a glorious victory could be enjoyed in voluptuous peace. Above all, I think this is because operating so ruthlessly deep inside a game logic not only means losing your basic regard for other people, it also perforce means seeing the world with a wide aperture: context and background is a big blur, so you never see the horizon, never notice the sun rising or setting, don't see the missile heading toward your generic climate-controlled office building. This means everything is just tactics, 'next move' — and thus both the victory and any point it could have had is completely lost.
The grand irony of a group of people for whom the means justifies the ends is that they completely lose track of the ends, and are all means (and very mean).
Ultimately, the individual-in-competition might become a playa, and be a masterful tactician within the bounded space of the game (they take to be the totality), but as such, they no longer really know why they're playing, what they're playing for, what it means, or why (or indeed, if at all) any of it matters.
At its now necessarily blurred horizon, 'playing to win', or being the 'last man standing' in an 'only one can live' dynamic is fundamentally amoral and even nihilistic.
Once we become absorbed by the game of competition, once we become ‘operators', once we only ever ruthlessly seek our advantage on the next move, every tactical victory brings us closer to strategic annihilation.
...The kill line is a dangerous place to be. In gaming, the term refers to the point at which a player's strength is so depleted that one more blow could lead to total wipeout. In China, the term refers to the risks that come with daily life in the US. In recent months, the Chinese media has been flooded with discussion of the so-called "kill line" that exists in US society. The social media posts, news articles, podcasts and blogs describe a vision of the US as a dystopian capitalist hell.
...what really stands out is the centrality of oil money from the Persian Gulf, money that has been crucial in two areas: Trump's international economic schemes and his personal enrichment.
One recurrent theme in Trump's economic speeches has been boasting about the size of the foreign investment pledges he has received as part of his tariff strategy. "In 12 months," he declared in the State of the Union, "I secured commitments for more than $18 trillion pouring in from all over the globe."
Nobody knows where that $18 trillion number, which he uses all the time, comes from. The actual announced pledges by foreign governments to invest in the U.S. add up to only about $6 trillion, and many of these pledges are vague statements of intent rather than serious commitments. Indeed, the deal with Europe may well be unraveling in part because Trump's tariffs have been ruled illegal.
...So when Trump boasts about the foreign investment he's bringing to America, the reality is mostly that Gulf petrostates have said — with dubious credibility — that they will make big investments. That puts his boasts in a somewhat different light, doesn't it?
And then there's Trump's relentless use of his office to enrich himself and his family. As the New York Times editorial board has documented, Trump has raked in at least $1.4 billion since returning to the White House. The biggest single piece of that total is Qatar's gift to him of a $400 million jet. Most of the rest has come from sales of cryptocurrency. We don't know who the buyers of Trump crypto are, but it seems likely that Gulf oil money has accounted for a large share. The Wall Street Journal reports that an Abu Dhabi royal secretly invested $500 million in World Liberty Financial, the center of the Trump crypto empire.
...Meanwhile Jared Kushner, the First Son-in-Law, has been acting as one of the U.S. government's chief negotiators on the Middle East while also raising large sums of money for his personal investment firm from investors in the region, especially the Saudi government's Public Investment Fund. That fund is led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman
...Why does Gulf oil money play an outsized role in U.S. corruption? Because petrostates, unlike advanced democracies, combine vast wealth with secrecy and a complete blurring of the lines between public office and private gain. So they're better placed than anyone else to line U.S. officials' pockets.
Foreign oil money, then, has been central to both the Trump administration's economic schemes and Trump's personal financial schemes. What has that money bought in terms of U.S. policy?
...it's a mistake to look for monocausal explanations of this debacle. But if you want to understand Operation Epic FUBAR, don't forget to follow the oil money.
...As of March 18 around 3,200 ships were stranded in the Gulf, with only a handful of tankers permitted to pass each day.
...Donald Trump has urged Western allies to help escort tankers through the Strait in an effort to keep prices in check, so far finding no takers; more recently he has threatened to strike Iran's power plants if its government refuses to reopen the waterway. Oil, in this sense, has become a proxy for the war's nearly incalculable costs.
...this image of the Gulf as little more than the world's oil spigot is profoundly outdated. Although oil and gas still underpin the region's wealth, its energy companies are no longer merely producers and exporters of crude. Over the past decade they have become highly diversified industrial giants, anchoring a vast system of production and trade that includes chemical plants, fertilizer complexes, shipping routes, and container ports.
That structural transformation has woven the Gulf much more deeply into the global economy than was the case half a century ago.
...Gulf states took over the "upstream" sector of the industry, the extraction of crude. But a handful of big Western oil multinationals, such as BP, Shell, Chevron, and Exxon, still managed much of the "downstream," meaning everything that happens after crude is pumped from the ground: refining, producing chemicals, overseeing shipping networks, marketing petroleum products to the consumer. When the 1973 embargo got underway, these firms were able to use their command over global transport and distribution infrastructures to reroute crude supplies from other regions and avoid significant shortages. This is why the popular image of the 1973 oil crisis as a moment when the world was held hostage by a handful of greedy "oil sheikhs" is fundamentally mistaken. In reality prices at the gas pump in countries like the US were set by Western oil companies, which took advantage of the shocks of the 1970s to reap enormous profits.
For much of the twentieth century, the geography of the oil trade ran west. Western firms purchased crude oil from producers in the Gulf and shipped it to markets in Europe and the US, where it could be refined into various fuels and chemical products. From the early 2000s onward, however, that structure began to shift decisively eastward. China's emergence as "the workshop of the world" required a huge increase in energy consumption, which in the past two decades has catalyzed a profound reorientation of the Gulf's exports away from the traditional Atlantic economies and toward East Asia.
In 2000 China accounted for just 4 percent of global oil imports. Today that figure sits at around 25 percent, of which last year more than 40 percent came from Iraq and the Gulf monarchies. Over the same period China's share of global liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports has also reached nearly 20 percent, more than a quarter of which originated from the Gulf in 2025, mostly from Qatar. The Gulf has thus become China's largest oil supplier and its second-largest source of liquefied natural gas after Australia. Iran supplies another 13 percent of China's oil, typically shipped through Malaysia and labelled as "Malaysia blend" to circumvent sanctions.
These changes in the global economy transformed the Gulf in turn. China's surging demand helped drive a sharp increase in global oil prices during the first decade of the new millennium, securing the Gulf states billions of dollars in wealth. Some of that wealth flowed into the spectacular real estate projects that now dominate Gulf skylines, as well as into overseas acquisitions. But a significant share was spent on expanding national oil companies into a variety of downstream sectors, above all the manufacture of chemicals, plastics, fertilizers, and other industrial materials.
This process has connected the Gulf with global supply chains in far deeper and more complex ways than the familiar stereotype of oil wells and tanker routes might suggest. The region's historic position in the making of the modern oil economy has turned it into a hub for the industries and infrastructures that convert hydrocarbons into the materials on which modern capitalism depends.
Among the most important chemicals that the Gulf started producing are polyethylene and polypropylene. These plastic resins make up nearly 60 percent of the world's plastic production, ending up in everything from packaging and consumer goods to industrial piping, electrical insulation, and chemical storage systems. Today the Middle East, led above all by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, accounts for more than 40 percent of global exports of these two essential polymers, more than any other region in the world. Much like the Gulf's crude oil, these materials flow predominantly to Asian markets, above all China. (Nearly a third of China's polyethylene imports come from the Gulf.) From there they make their way to the rest of the world in the form of industrial and consumer goods.
...Few nonspecialists ever think much about these chemicals, even though they are indispensable to the manufacture of countless goods. This invisibility distorts our picture of how global supply chains work, obscuring their enduring connection to the fossil fuel industry. Batteries and semiconductors, for instance, are often discussed as though they belonged to a world beyond fossil fuels. Yet their production remains fully dependent on chemicals that originate in the hydrocarbon economy.
Indonesia provides a revealing example. The country sits at the heart of the global nickel boom, producing more than half of the world's nickel ore and rapidly expanding its large-scale capacity to produce metals destined for the batteries of electric vehicles. Yet nickel extraction depends upon a leaching process that uses sulphuric acid, and the sulphur used to make that acid comes overwhelmingly from the Gulf (the source of roughly three quarters of Indonesia's imports). Far from standing outside these supposedly new "critical mineral" supply chains, the Gulf is deeply embedded in their foundations.
...Today nearly 28 percent of global ammonia exports originate in the Middle East, with Saudi Arabia ranking as the world's second-largest exporter (after Trinidad and Tobago). A large share of this ammonia goes to Morocco, which has one of the biggest fertilizer industries in the world, exporting widely to Latin America and South Asia. India is similarly dependent on Gulf supplies, sourcing nearly 80 percent of its ammonia imports from Oman, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Bahrain. The Gulf states not only export ammonia but convert it into fertilizer themselves, especially urea, the most widely used nitrogen fertilizer. They do so at enormous scale. Saudi Arabia is the world's largest exporter of urea, while Oman ranks fourth; collectively the Gulf now accounts for roughly a third of global urea exports.
...As the Gulf states' industrial capacities have expanded, they have also become far more central to the logistics of world trade. The nerve center of this network lies in the UAE, particularly Dubai's Port of Jebel Ali, the largest harbor in the Middle East and one of the busiest container terminals in the world. Constructed in the late 1970s, it is now the US Navy's busiest port of call outside of the US and a major logistical hub supporting American military operations. But over time the port has also evolved into a vast commercial complex, surrounded by free trade zones, manufacturing clusters, and logistics parks. Today it is managed by DP World, a sprawling state-owned ports and logistics company that ranks among the five largest port operators globally, controlling roughly 9 percent of the world's container market.
...by some estimates, an extraordinary 60 percent of China's trade with Europe and Africa passes through the UAE. The Gulf has thus become not only a source of energy and industrial materials but also a crucial commercial gateway connecting Asian manufacturing to the wider global economy.
...Especially now that the Gulf has such deep links to food systems and manufacturing across the Global South, crises that begin in the Middle East cascade through the global economy, with the heaviest burdens falling on the most vulnerable. In countries such as India, Bangladesh, and Indonesia, for instance, agriculture depends on imported fertilizers, including nitrogen-based products sourced from the Gulf, which underpin the high-yield farming systems that feed hundreds of millions of people. In Sudan, where famine conditions are already present in parts of the country and the food supply is under extreme strain, the same reliance on Gulf-produced fertilizers risks deepening an already catastrophic crisis.
...In trying to identify how the situation in the Middle East can resolve itself in a way that limits further damage to the region and the global economy, it feels more and more like the final stages approaching checkmate. Scanning the board, searching for a move, alongside an increasing realisation that defeat is fast approaching.
Conditions that have been launched by powerful and pernicious agency are lurching over into structural forces and systemic logics that cannot be easily controlled or undone. It is in this sense there are strong echoes of the first quarter of 2020, a transitional period as the arrival and recognition of COVID-19 occurred: 'gradually, then suddenly.'
"We are working closely with local authorities and prioritizing the safety of our personnel throughout our recovery efforts," an Amazon spokesperson told Gizmodo. "As this situation evolves and, as we have advised before, we request those with workloads in the affected regions continue to migrate to other locations."
...Earlier this month, a media agency affiliated with the Iranian regime released a list of big tech companies that the Iranian forces had described as new targets due to their links to American and Israeli military operations. According to that list, Microsoft, Google, Palantir, IBM, Nvidia, and Oracle's offices and cloud infrastructure in Israel and the Gulf region are now targets for potential Iranian strikes. A similarly aligned group also told Al Jazeera around the same time that American and Israeli economic centers and banks in the region are potential targets, warning civilians to "not be within a one-kilometre radius of banks."
...Trump said over the weekend that his administration was engaged in "very strong talks" to end the war, but Iranian authorities have denied the claim, and the war continues to rage on with no end in sight. Israel said on Tuesday that it was intent on retaining control of parts of southern Lebanon, while a New York Times report claimed that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has been pushing Trump to continue the war, seeing it as an opportunity to remake the region.
...Bear in mind that on the political right wind and solar power are routinely condemned as "woke." Real men burn stuff.
What this reflects, I believe, is a common factor underlying many right-wing obsessions. Why cling to fossil fuels in the face of a technological revolution in energy? Why valorize "warrior ethos" and bulging biceps in an age of drone warfare? Why build economic policy around a doomed attempt to bring back "manly" jobs? At a deep level, I'd argue, it's about nostalgia for an imagined past in which brawn mattered more than brains, combined with, yes, a hefty dose of insecure masculinity.
The world keeps declining to cooperate with these macho dreams. Tariffs aren't bringing back blue-collar jobs. Setting out to "destroy the enemy as viciously as possible" — as Pete Hegseth said Tuesday – isn't winning an easy victory over Iran. And turning our back on the energy revolution, even paying the private sector to reject new technology, means both making America less secure and ceding the future to other countries that aren't ruled by MAGA's obsessions.
But that appears to be a price both fossil fuel interests and the Trump administration are willing to pay.
...Iran is still able to fire cheaply made missiles and drones daily at Israel and U.S. allies, hitting targets with increasing accuracy. And, even as the International Energy Agency, last week, said that the war "is creating the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market," Iran has still been able to ship millions of barrels through the strait, earning foreign currency, as the regime selectively allows some ships to pass through that are linked to allies such as China. In a desperate effort to contain soaring energy prices, the U.S. Treasury Department has temporarily lifted sanctions on some Iranian oil to allow the sale of more than a hundred and forty million barrels of crude stranded on ships at sea. Paradoxically, this could help fund the war against the United States and its allies
Last weekend, President Donald Trump vowed that he would carry out huge strikes on Iran's energy infrastructure, in a threat meant to get Iran's government to open up the Strait of Hormuz. Iran's closure of the strait was one of the most geopolitically significant developments in a war that began last month with U.S. and Israeli strikes against Iran, and has caused chaos in the region and in the world economy. In recent days, however, Trump has seemingly searched for ways to de-escalate the conflict, promising to postpone the strikes while Iran and the U.S. consider ceasefire negotiations.
I recently spoke by phone with Ali Vaez, the director of the Iran Project at the International Crisis Group. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed what concessions Iran would want in any negotiations to end the war, whether the U.S. and Israel have the same objectives in Iran, and why an off-ramp—let alone a permanent peace—may be so hard to find.
...For the United States, there are only two possibilities in terms of escalation. One is a ground invasion of a Persian Gulf island or the southern shore of Iran, which could result in a very high number of American casualties, and obviously would deepen the conflict and make it even more complicated to solve. And the other option is to target Iranian energy infrastructure, which could result in Iran retaliating against the Gulf states and torching the entire regional infrastructure.
...What Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff have reportedly put on the table is almost a mirror image of Mike Pompeo's twelve demands in Trump's first term in office. And these are basically Israeli demands. So I don't think Trump is acting independently here. These are a set of demands that have been in the circles that are close to him for many years, and they have become a kind of orthodoxy that I don't think he can abandon, even if he doesn't personally believe in them. So he's stuck with them.
...There are a range of perspectives. There are those, like Oman, Qatar, and Kuwait, who would be happy with this war stopping immediately and some sort of mutually beneficial solution being presented. But for Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia I think the situation is different. They do not want this war to end with an Iran that can still project power beyond its borders and threaten their interests again by controlling the strait. The problem is that they don’t have a clear concept of what defanging Iran really means because Iran is threatening these countries by basically firing drones and missiles toward them.
The Pentagon has stated that the first two days of the current war against Iran cost the US about $5.6bn in munitions alone, and the first week about twice that in total costs. Considering the mix of offensive and defensive weapons fired against thousands of targets — perhaps as many as 15,000 to 20,000 already — this is a plausible pace of expenditure. Advanced defensive interceptors like the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system (THAAD) and long-range attack weapons like Tomahawk can cost several million dollars apiece.
That is a lot, but it is a far cry from the amount the White House is now seeking from Congress. The Trump administration plans to ask Congress for $200bn to fund the ongoing Iran war. This would be a gross overestimate of the costs of the war to date and at any time in coming weeks. Worse, if approved, it could be interpreted as a blessing by Congress for a major escalation — since nothing about the current operation implies such a price tag over the weeks to come. ... To grasp how excessive the $200bn request is, consider the costs of some past conflicts in the modern era ... Operation Desert Storm in 1991, with more than half a million US troops, lasted for 40 days of combat, plus several months of preparation and redeployment, and cost about $150bn as expressed in constant 2026 dollars (adjusted for inflation, that is).
The US role in the Iraq war of 2003-2011 cost about $135bn a year on average or more than $10bn a month, as expressed in 2026 dollars — with well over 100,000 American troops in the region on average. … The five-year campaign against Isis in Iraq and Syria from 2014 to 2019 cost less than $10bn per year for the air campaign in 2026 dollars. Typically, 2,000 to 3,000 munitions were dropped a month. Scaling that to today's larger operation, and accounting for the use of offensive and defensive weapons alike, would imply a pace of expenditure perhaps 20 to 30 times as great. The 78-day Kosovo air war of 1999 involved about 1,000 Nato planes and cost the US about $10bn in 2026 dollars. Taken together, these precedents suggest that the pace of costs of the first week of the Iran war was exceptionally high and has likely declined since. By the end of March, at the one-month mark, the US will probably have spent perhaps $30-40bn in overall military costs — just a fraction of the requested $200bn — unless this war goes through the entire summer, or winds up as a ground war.
America's secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, sports an array of tattoos with Christian messaging, including one which reads "Deus Vult", God wills it, and is associated with the medieval crusades. So perhaps it shouldn't come as a surprise that, while leading a Christian service at the Pentagon on March 25, Hegseth reached for biblical language to describe the war against Iran.
He called on God to "break the teeth" and kill the "wicked" enemies "who deserve no mercy" and should be "delivered to the eternal damnation prepared for them". In other words, for Hegseth this is a holy war in which he calls on god to "grant this task force clear and righteous targets for violence".
This war is not primarily about religion. But leaders on all sides have used religion to justify their actions. Not for decades have political leaders of all three major Abrahamic faith traditions invoked parts of their respective traditions to legitimise war in this way. The way faith and religious scripture and doctrine have been used by the US and Israel to justify launching their war in Iran is a worrying development, and one that highlights the growing relationship between religion and authoritarian nationalism.
...In this current instance of assertion of US power in the region, it is necessary to follow the money. And when Trump is involved that is the one thing that matters.
It's no wonder that various administration spokesmen have been all over the map trying to define what our objectives are in attacking Iran. It's because none of them can come out and say that at the heart of the matter, in my opinion, it is to make the President of the United States and his family richer.
...The religious militancy of Ayatollah Khomeini is based on his doctrine of vilayet al-faqih which means rule of the cleric and his assertion that he was the representative on earth of the occluded Imam, Muhammad ibn al Hasan al Mahdi who disappeared from the world in 874 CE and was a direct descendant through Ali ibn Abu Talib of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh).
...In my opinion, Netanyahu owns Trump. AIPAC gave the Trump campaign somewhere between $230-300 million. Plus, there is the unknown issue of exactly what information on Trump, Jeffery Epstein might have given Mossad or what Putin might have given the Israelis for that matter.
In the case of the Saudis, it is being widely reports that they gave Trump the final shove to start this war. What does Trump get out of it?
Let's see. The Saudis have already placed $2 billion from its sovereign wealth fund with Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner's company.
There are two Trump Tower deals on the drawing board, one in Riyadh and one in Jeddah, each for $1 billion.
The Saudis put $2 billion into Trump's Stablecoin.
There are two Trump golf course developments in Saudi Arabia totaling $5.5 billion in progress with a Saudi developer, the first at Wadi Safar, Diriyah just outside of Riyadh.
In addition to this, Saudi Arabia is the main purchaser of US defense systems which are of a scale projected to provide major support to the US economy according to the Q3 and Q4 GDP report, something that the Trump administration needs given the mismanagement of other aspects of the US economy.
...This war has taken the spotlight off Palestine as Israel halts humanitarian aid to dying Gaza, and the West Bank is being taken over by right-wing settlers. Meanwhile, a mere 1 in 4 Americans support the US missile strikes in Iran costing American taxpayers $1 billion/day.
Israeli chauvinism is based on a lie, one the world has been convinced to believe. What does Palestinian writer Abu Alya, from Gaza and now in exile, mean by this? He explains that Israel called the land of Palestine a land without a people, a barren desert that they made bloom, when the truth is that Palestine was a land cultivated by farmers for thousands of years, a literate country of newspapers and cinemas, with a “developed civic and agricultural life.” Their tragedy was to be a "people written out of history." And the greatest tragedy is that "the world has accepted the original lie." This made possible the war in Iran.
Iran has built a three-tier access system for the most important waterway on earth. Tier one: allies transit free. Malaysia cleared seven vessels through diplomacy at zero cost. India negotiated zero-fee passage. Pakistan secured clearance for 20 ships. Iraq transits without charge. These countries proved geopolitical alignment and the IRGC waved them through the Larak corridor without collecting a rial. Tier two: compliant neutrals pay. At least two tankers, likely Chinese-linked, paid up to two million dollars each in yuan through Kunlun Bank intermediaries. COSCO container ships attempted the corridor, were turned back on first approach when documentation was incomplete, then succeeded days later with revised paperwork.
These are the vessels that prove the system works. They submit IMO numbers, ownership chains, cargo manifests, and crew lists to the IRGC's Hormozgan Command. They receive clearance codes. They are escorted by pilot boats through the five-nautical-mile channel between Qeshm and Larak. They pay in a currency that does not route through SWIFT. Every successful yuan transit is a live proof-of-concept for non-dollar energy settlement. Tier three: adversaries are denied entirely. The committee plan bans American vessels, Israeli vessels, and vessels from any country participating in sanctions against Iran. These ships do not get vetting. They do not get codes. They do not get escorts. They get the AL SALMI, burning off Dubai, as illustration of what the corridor looks like without permission. But the toll is not the real cost.
War-risk insurance is. Premiums have surged from $40,000 per VLCC transit before the war to $600,000 to $1.2 million today, a 30-fold increase, now running five to ten percent of hull value. A VLCC carrying $50 million in crude oil can absorb a combined $3 million in toll and insurance as a fraction of cargo value. A container ship carrying $5 million in manufactured goods cannot. The insurance premium alone exceeds the profit margin on non-oil cargo. The strait has become an oil-only VIP lane. Crude flows selectively for those who can pay the combined cost. Everything else waits, reroutes around the Cape of Good Hope, or does not move at all. ... One hundred and eighty-one vessels transited in all of March. Pre-war traffic was 138 per day. Of those 181, roughly 70 percent were Iranian-affiliated. The remaining 30 percent were vetted allies or yuan-paying neutrals. The 20 percent of global oil that once flowed freely through this strait now flows selectively, conditionally, and in currencies chosen by Tehran.
...For as long as we know, Hormuz, a tiny island at the narrowest point of the Persian Gulf, has been commercially significant. In the 15th century it was a thriving trade emporium between the lands lining the Persian Gulf and the Indian Subcontinent. That is why the Portuguese established control over it in the early 16th century. The Safavids, the first dynasty interested in the Persian Gulf since antiquity, in 1622 took Hormuz from the Portuguese with naval assistance of the English East India Company. Shah Abbas, the Safavid ruler at the time, transferred trade to the mainland by creating a port, Bandar Abbas, thus ending the isle’s commercial efflorescence. Yet the strait of Hormuz remained important as a passageway to the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean. Of course, only the discovery and exploration of oil in the region in the early 20th century, lent the waterway true global importance. The rivalry between Iran and the Arab world over jurisdiction and even its name—Persian Gulf v. Arabian Gulf—is also far more recent than commonly thought. Until modern times, the mostly Turkic Iranian regimes, whose roots lay in Central Asia and the Caucasus, were hardly familiar with or interested in, the sea.
What will the costs of the latest round of illegal, ill-fated U.S. military adventurism in the Middle East amount to? Some of the toll is already clear. Washington has squandered billions of dollars on a reckless war of aggression against Iran. A merciless campaign of aerial bombardment has driven millions from their homes. American and Israeli airstrikes have rained destruction on 10,000 civilian sites and already killed more than 3,000 people in Iran and Lebanon. Among the dead are more than 200 children, many killed in a U.S. strike on a girls' school, a war crime that evokes the grim precedent of such past American atrocities as the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam or the 1991 Amiriyah shelter bombing in Iraq.
The latest war has also dealt a potentially fatal blow to our already battered democratic institutions. It's a war neither authorized by Congress nor supported by the public. Instead, it was launched by a president who refuses to submit to the law or heed the will of the people, claiming in true authoritarian fashion that he is the law, and that he alone embodies the popular will.
...The costs associated with this latest criminal war, measured in human lives; the misappropriation of national resources; and the erosion of the rule of law will only continue to mount. Yet there is also a less visible, less immediate price tag for such wars. If the history of American interventions in the region offers any guide, the full bill will likely not become apparent for months, years, or even decades. When it finally arrives, however, it will carry a familiar name: blowback.
