Air Date: 4–18-2026

Full Episode Notes

Welcome to this episode of the Award-Winning Best of the Left Podcast.
Today we examine how the US War with Iran has exposed the deep structural rot at the heart of American power, the global economic catastrophe quietly building beneath the surface and the cuts felt at home in order to pay for it all.
For those, looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our top takes in about 45 minutes today include DwightT Eisenhower, the Briefing, Paul Krugman, the Independent Drop Site News, democracy now, Brendan Miller and LBC.
Then in the additional deeper dives, half of the show there will be more in six sections, section A, Lebanon under attack, section B, the world D idolizes, section C, world Economy in peril, section D, the moral rot of war profiteering, section E, the damage our military does, and Section F making China great again.
But first, a reminder to check out our new show solved on the best of the left YouTube channel.
We're really proud of the show we're making and think you'll get real value out of it.
Plus you checking it out will help us find new viewers on YouTube.
So thanks in advance for all of your views, likes, subscribes, and comments.
That's all on the best of the left YouTube channel.
Linked in the show notes and now onto the show.

A burden of arms draining the wealth and labor of all peoples, a wasting of strength that defies the American system or the Soviet system, or any system to achieve true abundance and happiness for the peoples of this earth.
Every gun that is made, every worship launch.
Every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not theft.
Those who are cold and are not closed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants each serving a town of 60,000 populations.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
It is some 50 miles of concrete pavement.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

This is, I repeat the best way of life to be found on the road.
The world has been taken.
This is not a way of life at all in any 2 cents under the cloud of threatening war.
It is humanity hanging from a cross of island.

Before I play you this next very instructive clip, I wanna note that the only reason we have it is because the White House seemingly accidentally posted a live stream of it, which they then tried to delete, but not before the internet saved it for posterity.
And just for context, Donald Trump starts by referring to the head of the Office of Management and Budget, the Christian nationalist author of Project 2025 Russell Vought.

We can't take care of daycare.
We're a big country.
We have 50 states.
We have all these other people.
We're fighting wars.
We're we can't take care of daycare.
You gotta let a state take care of daycare.
And they should pay for it too.
They should pay, they have to raise their taxes, but they should pay for it.
We have to take care of one thing.
Military protection, we have to guard the country.

All right, all these little scams that have taken place like that, little scam daycare.
Joining me now is Democratic Senator Chris Van Holland, member of the Foreign Relations Committee.
Senator, good to see you.
Thank you for being with us.
Lemme throw some numbers out at you.
Apparently the Penn Wharton budget model says we, this war has cost $65 billion so far.
White House is asking for $200 billion for it.
The tomahawk missiles alone are $3 billion.
They take a year to two to build per missile.
We've, we've spent $3 billion on them.
This is in a country where we had doge ripping apart the government last year.
We had people not getting their food stamps.
We have people not getting their, Their Obamacare subsidies, but we're spending somewhere between 65 billion and $200 billion on a war that no one is able to explain.

Well, Ali, that's right.
And we should all remember that during the campaign candidate Donald Trump promised that he would keep us out of foreign wars and focus instead on trying to make things better right here at home.
Instead, he is, along with Prime Minister Netanyahu started a foreign war.
Prices are going up.
And now he says, well, we've gotta pay for this war in Iran by cutting back on federal investments.
You played the clip with childcare, but there are also other points in that speech where he talks about cutting Medicaid, cutting Medicare.
So the bottom line is the President who said he wouldn't start a war now wants to pay for it by cutting deeply into American healthcare programs and other, other programs that help American families here at home.
But that's not that surprising, is it, Senator?
I mean, you go back to the history of wars that America has started.
One group tends to benefit from this very well either oil producers or, or or, or munitions makers.
I mean, that's just, that's the nature of the game.
It becomes too much money that we have to pay for a war.
So you're gonna have to cut it from the people who can least afford it.

Well, that's, that's exactly right.
I mean, you've got defense contractors who are gonna be raking it in and other folks who are close to the president are gonna be raking it in.
But the American people will suffer.
And of course, this comes on top of what Donald Trump and Republicans in Washington did last year, right?
They passed their so-called big beautiful bill, which was beautiful.
If you're a billionaire, you got really big tax cuts.
But to partially pay for that, they cut Medicaid, they cut food nutrition programs.
So now comes this year and Donald Trump goes off and starts a war and says, well, we're gonna have to cut back on Medicare.
We're gonna have to cut back on Medicaid.
We're gonna have to cut back on our efforts to make childcare more affordable.
At the end of the day, he is screwing the American people and doing exactly what he said he was going to avoid.
He said he was gonna focus on things here at home, keep us out of foreign wars.
He's done exactly the opposite.
I was talking to Ben Rhodes about this a minute ago.
I wanna play it for you.
Something that he said about gas prices in the Oval Office.
Let's listen.

Gas prices today, they hit $4 and we have $4.
Yeah.
And we have a country that's not gonna be throwing a nuclear weapon at us in six months, of course.
But Americans are feeling the effects in the interim of, and they're also feeling a lot safer.
What is the plan to bring them back down?
All I have to do is leave Iran and we'll be doing that very soon, and they'll become tumbling down.
We're not gonna have a country that's gonna be throwing a nuclear weapon at us in, in six months.
That's just nonsensical talk.
There.
There was, there there's no I mean, These things you're on, you're on serious committees in the Senate.
There was no you discussion about Iran throwing a nuclear weapon at America in six months or six years.

It was a complete and total lie.
Ali and the president himself told the country last year that he had decimated, obliterated it.
Iran's nuclear richen program.
Obliterated it.
And then his DNI, Tulsi Gabbard testified publicly the other day that Iran has made no effort to try to reconstitute, That nuclear enrichment program.
And so that was just a complete and total lie.
And as you and Ben Rhodes discussed, I mean, they're nowhere near any kind of ballistic missile that can reach the United States.
So this was all a fabrication by the President of the United States to try to justify his actions while Americans are here hurting here at home, we've lost 13 of our service members.
Hundreds wounded, as you discussed, thousands of civilians killed in the region.
We're paying $2 billion a day.
We the American taxpayers, while gas prices are going up.
And now Donald Trump says, well we've gotta cut back on other investments that are important to the American people.
This war should never have started.
We should end it.
Now, Donald Trump is talking about asking for another $200 billion, and I can tell you, Ali, I won't vote for one more dime for this illegal war of choice.
I think we're gonna find a lot of people on both sides of the aisle who are gonna say, no one has given us an explanation as to why we need to be spending another dime on this war.

The story keeps changing.
We're either going to apply force and devastate Iran, or our job is done, and it's up to other countries to reopen the strai of horror moves because we don't rely on it as the President.
Which is first of all, it turns out not to be true.
The, the United States does not import significant amounts of crude oil coming through the Strait of Horus.
But we do import fertilizer, which I didn't, wasn't aware of.
Lots of things that are coming to light now that we're facing the crisis.
And the reason we are getting fertilizer mostly from Qatar is that the fertilizer is made, urea and some other things are made from natural gas.
Natural gas can be exported, is exported in large quantities from the Persian Gulf or was until this war began.
But That's expensive.
You have to super cool it and liquefy it and ship it out through special terminals and special ships and it, it can be done and it's become really critical to a large part of the world.
But the other thing you can do with the natural gas that's available in, in the Persian Gulf area is converted into fertilizer, which is a lot easier to ship.
And so a lot of the world's fertilizer turns out to come from that area and normally get shipped through the strait.
And the United States we're a great agricultural nation and we do import significant amounts of fertilizer.
We import a large share of our fertilizer and some of it from the Persian Gulf, a significant share of that.
So this is having a direct impact on US farmers.
The price of urea is way, way up.
And there's something that I recently been alerted to.
They're just quite scary.
The planting season is coming up, says somebody who has no idea what agricultural life is like, but that's what I'm told.
And the farmers have long since contracted for their fertilizer.
They, they already they, they, they've already paid or at least signed the contracts.
The prices are locked in.
But will there actually be fertilizer available?
It's not at all hard to imagine that the suppliers will declare a force majeure say there's a war on which is normally a, a valid excuse for backing out of contracts and simply fail to supply the fertilizer.
That would be a real catastrophe.
By the way, there are other places where that's going to matter.
The airlines quite often, Airlines cancel flights all the time and sometimes they declare force majeure and cancel flights and don't even compensate.
Although that I think is less of an issue right now.
But Jet fuel.
The price of jet fuel has risen at last.
I checked 88% since the crisis began.
Airlines they're already talking about it, Cutting back schedule.
It's not about canceling well, it's not entirely clear.
And for the mo, my, I'm as insulated as anybody can get from all of this.
But Robin and I do have, Some travels planned starting in, in late April.
And the mixture of, of pleasure and business and some of it we really need to be in certain places seems entirely possible that flights will be canceled.
We may or may not receive compensation, which I don't really care about, but the, but just not being able to get to the places that I have promised to be would be a really serious disruption.
Now, this is trivial compared with farmers are facing potential financial ruin.
But this is just an illustration of the disruptions, and of course, at a fundamental level, saying that because the United States doesn't buy its oil from the Persian Gulf, That therefore we are insulated.
This doesn't matter to us.
I mean, take a look at your gas station.
Gas prices are up about a dollar a gallon since the, since the war began.
Wholesale gas prices are up about a dollar 20 a gallon.
So this is gonna get worse.
Diesel is up even more.
So this is the fact that the United States actually produces more oil than it consumes is pretty much irrelevant.
If you want to ask our how does the US economy get affected?
Well, the economy is people like soil and green.
I mean, the economy is people, and most people in the United States are significantly adversely affected.
By the spillover from this war.
Now oil companies particularly oil refiners who seem to be seeing a big explosion in their margins, they're doing well.
But what good does that do?
The rest of us, it's not as if the US has any fiscal measures in, in place to capture those gains.
So this is, in fact, hitting the United States is hitting all of us quite hard.
And it may be actually kind of catastrophic because plans, plans to travel, nevermind.
But plans to plant crops may be seriously endangered by all of this.
Has anybody told Trump about this?
From everything we're reading?
The answer is probably not.
Basically we're in a situation where the, the court here is don't tell the the emperor that he has no clothes and don't tell them that.
Actually warn the Persian Gulf really hurts the United States a lot too.

On Wednesday, the Israeli military said it launched its heaviest ever strikes across Lebanon hitting a hundred targets in just 10 minutes alone.
That's killed more than 250 people and injured over a thousand others.
According to the Lebanese authorities footage taken from the ground in places like Beirut to the East in Bakar and in the South was horrifying.
We were speaking to witnesses, including the wounded from their own hospital beds, and they described the bombardment like a ring of fire and an earthquake.
Now, this all happened just a few hours after Pakistan announced that it had successfully brokered a truce between the U.S.-Israel and Iran.
A truce it said included Lebanon.
This was refuted immediately afterwards by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Since then, Israel has been continuously bombing Lebanon.
The concern is that this is not only going to exacerbate an already existing humanitarian catastrophe in Lebanon that could actually scupper those peace talks, which are due to start in just a few days in Islamabad.
I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the conflict in the Middle East has had an unprecedented impact on the world.
We've already seen the worst disruptions to global energy supplies in history.
We've seen major transport hubs like the Doha and the Dubai airports close.
All of us have felt this.
Our energy bills have been soaring over the last few weeks.
Everything is dependent on those talks which are due to start imminently.
The hopes for these torques actually resulting in a workable peace plan are already pretty slim.
There's massive differences between what all sides want out of it, including who's gonna control the straight of M.
What's gonna happen to Iran's nuclear program and its ballistic missile capabilities.
Putting any external pressure onto those talks is going to make that job even harder.
And so the fear is if Israel keeps bombing Lebanon, those talks won't be successful, and the hopes for peace for the region and for the world will only be further away.

The Iranians in the statement from the Supreme National Security Council, that was Iran's first.
Official response to this.
That's the highest decision making body when it comes to national security issues.
And it operates directly under, Mojtaba Khamenei, the new supreme leader of, of Iran.
You can take that to the bank in terms of it being the policy of the state.
And what they said was that they do not trust the Americans at all, that their assumption is that the US will not abide by anything that it publicly states that it agrees in.
And the Iranians for many, many weeks have been told, telling us that the, that any deal must apply to all fronts of resistance.
And they also mention Palestine as well.
And we'll be talking later to Abu Ubaida, but the Israelis are continuing to carry out sporadic but heavy and lethal attacks inside of Gaza.
One, one thing this is, is related in a sense, but we understand that the this interim governing committee that is supposed to be entering Gaza is being blocked by the representative in charge of the implementation of this from Trump's so-called Board of peace.
So the Iranians represent the most significant military force within the axis of resistance.
What Maz, I think is a hundred percent right.
I've heard a lot of frustration expressed by Iranians that there hasn't already been a swift response to the fact that Netanyahu just killed several hundred Lebanese, most of them civilians, including small children.
And and I think that the Iranians are being very, very serious when they say that this entire deal may be blown up.
Now, it's also possible if you study the track record of Trump and Netanyahu and so-called Ceasefires, it's possible that the Trump administration has let loose some leash on this for Netanyahu, have given him a certain amount of time where they feel like he can push it so far get his last kind of massive attacks in before they have to take a two week break and try to see.
If they can get more interceptors to the region they still, I think, are deluding themselves into believing that the Iranians are gonna capitulate in some format.
From the Iranian perspective, again, they feel even though they've endured this massive bombing, that they have greater leverage right now.
And an ability to call for a lifting of sanctions in a way that never was possible prior to the, the, the start of these wars.
And they're not going to just simply abandon that on this issue of Trump saying that he was gonna bomb, you know, bomb their civilization and he was gonna hit their energy plants, et cetera.
It's very interesting because many thousands of Iranians, including some prominent people who are known for being critical at times of the Iranian government, vowed to create human chains around Iranian infrastructure.
And they went out and they, they did this.
And I think there's been a real unifying force that has set in as a result of this US Israeli bombing.
Trump recently said out loud that the US gave a tremendous amount of weapons mm-hmm.
To to people inside of Iran, To who, who tried to engage in some sort of an uprising, Or rebellion in, in January.
People who were saying, who were pointing this out at the time and saying that Iran is not lying when they talk about their being for an influence.
They were derided as regime apologists and, you know, massacre denialists.
And the fact is that now the president of the United States has openly stated what Mike Pompeo implied at the time.
Mm-hmm.
What prominent Israelis close to Netanyahu implied at the time that the entire thing was that, that Netanyahu sold Trump on the idea that there was some kind of gonna be some kind of color revolution and you just needed to, to, to light the spark.
And the reality is the opposite has, has set in.
And if the US had done this to Iran.
If they had started to attack major power facilities, I believe that the Iranians would've made good on their promise to just absolutely light up the the Persian Gulf.
Mm-hmm.
To hit infrastructure in an unprecedented way across that region.
You would have Ansarallah then close the Bab el-Mandeb, the US economy.
The world economy would've gone into a total free fall, and there would've been utter panic among the Gulf allies that have been cultivated as business partners by Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
Yeah.
And I, I know you have to go on a moment, so I wanted to ask you about this another comment that I saw, I think it was from Mohammad Marandi as well, it, but the, basically he was saying, you know, there's a possibility here that you could see a situation develop, Where we reach in a, we reach a, an agreement with the United States for a ceasefire, but Israel refuses to recognize it, and that we continue our conflict directly with Israel.
And you described that as sort of a kind of best case scenario now from Israel's perspective, that what I would imagine be somewhere in the ranks of worst case scenarios.
But, and this, this is what I, I wanna ask like, is, is that, is that something that's being discussed?
Is that a potential strategic outcome for the Iranians out of this?
And from the Israeli perspective, like, what are they thinking?
Because that possibility seems, Pretty like a pretty awful outcome for them.
Is it related to the fact that this, this current outcome is devastating for Netanyahu?
Like if, I think that if it stops at this point, I, I mean, I think there's a couple levels on which we need to think about this.
Fir first.
I, I get the sense, and I think this is borne out in the public statements of Iranians for many, many years.
That Iran believes that it is going to remain in a perpetual state of war against the Zionist entity against Israel.
And that nothing that happens right now is going to fundamentally change that.
I think that primarily the Iranians are looking for a non-aggression pact with the United States.
Remember in the ceasefire that was signed between Ansarallah and the Trump administration, Ansara Law often referred to as the Houthis in Yemen it was a bilateral agreement with the United States, but Ansarallah did not agree to stop attacking Israel as a result of its ceasefire with the United States.
And so I, I think that the Iranians and, and actually the late leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, would frequently talk about this in his speeches on who's actually controlling the levers of power.
Is it the United States or is it Israel?
And I think that what, what the Iranians recognize is that they've sent a very serious message about the endurance capacity of the US military presence in the Persian Gulf region in the Middle East.
I think many people across the Arab and Islamic world believe that Israel has set in motion events that ultimately could lead to the total destruction of the Zionist project.
And so, I, I wouldn't I wouldn't assume that Iran is calculating that if a deal is reached to end this war, even in a long-term sense with the United States, that it means that the war with Israel is going to come to is gonna come to an end.
Israel may think that it's winning and running the deck right now, but, History has a long arc.
And, and I think some some years from now we will look back and recognize that when Netanyahu and Israel decided to wage the genocidal war against Gaza, they set into motion events that then spiral beyond their control and potentially will cause the entire collapse of the leaning Tower of Zionists.
On

why launch a war without a clear objective or plan and it won't even help you politically at home?
Well, I think I have an answer, and it lies with a series of essays by a French thinker titled The Gulf War did not take Place.
This book with its confusing title was about the 1991 action against Saddam Hussein and caused a lot of controversy at the time.
But I believe it gives an insight into how Donald Trump views war.
One that not only explains this conflict, but helps predict what he might do next, and that also reveals the flaw at the heart of Trump's thinking word that Iraq has invaded neighboring state of Kuwait with fighting reported along the border.
The residents say that they were awakened by machine gunfire and heavy artillery saying the Gulf War didn't take place.
Obviously seems mad.
It was after all a real war with bombs, violence, death, and so on.
So what did he mean?
Well, at this point, I should admit Jean Baudrillard, like many such thinkers is stimulating and interesting, but also elusive.
There are essentially, on my reading of his essays, three things he sang.
First, Baudrillard was saying that the Gulf War was such a one-sided conflict that to use the label war with its sense of uncertainty and drama was kind of a disgusting fiction.
Second Baudrillard was reacting to the way the Gulf War was the first live TV war, CNN broadcasting 24 hours a day full of videos of laser guided bombs hitting their targets for Baudrillard.
One of the reasons the war did not exist was that it was grotesquely, sanitized and clean.
One where the public saw the missile hits, but not the violence or death that followed.
Third, and this is the strangest part, he was arguing these images didn't just represent or misrepresent the war.
They were the war.
In other words, the videos, tv, all these images that represented reality had come to almost replace that reality.
As Ian Leslie, who wrote a great essay on this, puts it everyone, politicians and generals included, was lost inside the simulation.
The spectacle had swallowed the reel.
Baudrillard's word for this statey.
A state where the representation of something becomes more real and more important than the thing itself, almost to the point where there's no difference.
Now, I think Baudrillard was wrong about the Gulf War.
Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait and threatened the world's oil supply.
And George Bush senior's action had real world consequences, even for the Americans watching it on tv.
But what if you had a president who wasn't like George Bush?
What if you had a president who didn't just see how the media can shape the experience of war, but who saw the war on TV as the reality you would have seen what happened?
I mean, I watched it literally like I was watching a television show, the speed, the violence.
They say that the speed, the violence they use that term.
It's just, it was an amazing thing when I made my video on the Venezuela attack.
I examined various theories about Trump's motivation.
I asked whether it was a reverse domino strategy to topple the regime in Cuba or part of a Monroe Doctrine, where the US would focus on the western hemisphere or maybe an imperial project to get the country's oil as Trump claimed.
But all the theories fell short.
Even Trump's rationale about getting the oil was scoffed by oil execs saying the project wasn't viable.
But when you think of the conflict as a TV show, shaped by a desire to maintain and keep tension.
Then it makes a lot more sense.
You notice how important it was for Trump to post that iconic photo of Maduro.
You notice the weird video set to a Vietnam era protest song, or the way White House photos of the operation showed that the largest screen visible in the room was open to X, seemingly so the administration could monitor how the campaign was going on social media, and when you considered that, the operation started with promises of huge change.
So we are gonna stay until such time as we're gonna run it essentially until such time as a proper transition can take place, but ended with the same regime in place and the whole incident.
Now basically memory hold.
It really does feel like you could say the Venezuela War did not take place finishing this fight.
Yeah, and when it comes to the Iran conflict, it feels like once again, Trump is in hyper reality where the war exists mainly as videos and images.
This explains the endless flow of videos mixing up clips of the conflict with popular culture.
Time to find out maximum.
It explains the administration's obsession with media coverage.
Trump administration is threatening to go after US TV networks for their coverage of the war with Iran.
FCC Chair, Brendan Carr threatened to revoke their licenses over the coverage, accusing the media of running what he called hoaxes and news distortions related to the war.
For example, a banner or a headline, Mideast war intensifies splashing on the screen the last couple of days.
What should the banner read instead?
How about Iran?
Increasingly desperate?
And it explains the grotesquely unserious way in which Trump seems to think about this war repeatedly calling it an excursion.
Answering a question about whether Americans should worry about Iranian attacks at home with the words, I guess, or talking about how the US has totally demolished much of Iran's key oil island before adding.
We may hit it a few more times just for fun.
If you understand Trump as living in hyper reality, just seeing war as a TV show, it makes sense that the objective of the war is always changing, that the operation was so badly thought out, and that there is an ever changing timetable.
It makes sense because the objectives, plans and timetable don't matter if this is just a TV show.
And the quote that really sums it up was in an interview with ABC's Jonathan Carl saying, I hope you are impressed.
How do you like the performance?
I mean, Venezuela is obvious.
This might be even better.
How do you like the performance?
It's similar to something he said in that interview about the Venezuela attack I played earlier.
Yeah.
And don't forget, I've done some pretty good ones in in other parts of the world.
Okay.
I've done some pretty good ones, but I've never seen anything like this.
I was, I was able to watch it in real time and I watched every aspect of it.
Some good ones.
I mean, it really is like he's a TV producer whose job it is to put on some good episodes for the audiences at Home Flash.
The Pure has just received a post card from a friend vacationing abroad on.

Now obviously media has always been part of war, but the way I see it, this was media used to sell a war.
War that was happening for a real reason.
But Trump's wars feel different.
Sure, there are definitely key people involved who have reasons.
Marco Rubio seems to want to regime change his way through Latin America.
And Netanyahu wants, I suspect, to create a failed state in Iran that will weaken it as an adversary.
But these are not the motivations of the person at the top.
He's running the TV Trump show, and if you bring him storylines that will gather attention of viewers, then he's happy to say yes to them.
Alright.
I think we've seen enough.
What do you think this is?
This is gonna be great television.
I will say that once you notice this aspect of Trump, you see it everywhere.
The way he retreated on ice once the TV pictures went bad, the way he focuses on ratings when he insults people, his appointment of TV pundits rather than actual serious people that could get things done.
And it's clearly an obsession that is lifelong pursuing tabloid coverage and celebrity even once pretending to be his own PR person so he could impress a reporter.
He's somebody that has a lot of options and frankly you know, he gets called by everybody.
He gets called by everybody in the book in terms of women.
But if Trump was happy for this war to be a TV war or a meme war disconnected in this hyper real world.
Well, the reality is turning out differently.

Four months.
The question hanging over the Middle East has been simple.
Are we heading towards a deal or something much worse?
This weekend, we got our answer.
After 21 hours of talks in Islamabad, the most senior direct engagements between Washington and Tehran in decades.
For now at least it's over.
No deal, no breakthrough, no path forward.
And with that, we're back to where we started, probably because strip away the noise, the threats, the strike, the war, the talk of regime change from the Trump administration and the basic reality before the war is the same as now.
It hasn't changed at all.
What the last five weeks has proven is that the United States cannot force Iran to abandon its nuclear program down the barrel of a gun, or at least guns wielded from the air alone.
If war is politics by another means, it has not worked.
This politics, arguably both sides are now further apart than they were before this war began.
In fact, you could argue that the war has made things worse.
Iran now has more leverage, not less sitting a stride.
The strait of M able to squeeze the global energy markets without ever having the need to even build a bomb.
And the Americans, well, they've expanded their demands from nuclear limits to missiles, to regional proxies.
Turning what was once something of a narrow deal with a narrower set of aims into something almost impossible to agree.
So here we are, no regime change.
In fact, a regime which is more hard line, less theocratic state, more standard issue military dictatorship than before the Iranian state still standing.
The nuclear ambitions still there and diplomacy back to square one, which leaves an uncomfortable conclusion because however much politicians may dislike it in Washington, however toxic it sounds, under President Trump, the only deal that has ever worked, even imperfectly, is the one we already had a version of the nuclear agreement, a version of the JCPOA as it's called, the one abandoned that, the one that Trump abandoned.
But in effect, he must now try and recreate with a regime stung, yet feeling empowered in a ous shaped driving seat.
The JCPOA Obama era wasn't perfect, but at least it had some effect because it recognized a basic truth.
You don't get everything you want from Iran, you settle for less than that, or you get nothing at all.
And right now, right now, we've got nothing.
We've got worse than nothing.
And the question of what comes next is, while nobody in Washington or Toran seems ready to answer or even able to answer,

the blockade is being forced according to centcom by 10,000 US troops, over a dozen warships, dozens of aircraft.
Can you explain exactly what's happening and for the geographically challenged the difference between the Strait of Horus, the Persian Gulf, and how it's extending beyond to the Red Sea and the sea of Oman.
Okay.
Thank you very much for having me on.
And yes, sadly, this is a terrible way for my area of expertise to actually be of relevance.
So for first the geography of the area.
The Persian or Arabian Gulf sits between Iran on the north, sliver of Iraq on the west, and then the various countries that, that are known as Emirates or kingdoms of the Gulf, Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates around the southern shore of the Persian Gulf at the narrowest bit where the Persian Gulf meets the Gulf of Oman on the other side that's the Strait of hormones, which, Depending on how you measure it, it's Around 25 to 30 nautical miles.
So the Gulf the, the, the Strait of Hormones lies in the north between Iran and the North, and, The Musandam Peninsula, which is an extension of Oman in the South.
So in fact, the water of the Strait of Horus is divided between those.
There is no high seas.
There is, this is not, this is, this is territorial waters divided evenly between the two countries.
So that's the first thing.
The second thing is that of course the whole the Iran has basically lies on the entire northern shore of the Persian Gulf, but also the Gulf of Oman.
So it does have capacities.
In fact, one of Iran's big ports in which India invested Chabahar is, In the eastern part of Iran in the northern shore of the Gulf of Oman.
Red Sea is on the other, the Red Sea is on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula.
So the Red Sea lies on the western shore of Saudi Arabia.
And the way that Iran can disrupt, Trade in that in the Red Sea is through firing missiles.
For example, as it has done already to the Port of Yanbu, which is a oil lifting port for South Saudi Arabia and the Red Sea, but also through possibly having its ally the Ansarallah of, Yemen, which are otherwise also known as the Houthis disrupting trade there as they did during the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
But there are a couple of things about that blockade question that I think is really important to note.
First of all, the US claims to have stopped completely and totally the trade of oil out of Iran.
Or indeed that has blockaded any kind of ships going to or from Iran.
In fact reporting from shipping companies that actually track this stuff, comes back that in the four days since the blockade has started, somewhere between 14 to 15 ships, Have gone through the straight of formers, at least half of them to Iran.
And the way that they have done so is either through route that obviously the US is incapable or of or not particularly good at policing through spoofing their, Automatic identification system.
Spoofing is this process where the automatic identification system is essentially presented as somebody else's, Either system indicating a different country or different flag, country for the ship.
And or ships have gone dark, which is something that ha happens all the time.
In fact, when I traveled on a freighter many, many years ago 10, 11 years ago, one of the things that was most striking when going through the Red Sea the Gulf of Aiden and indeed the Persian Gulf was the extent to which warships, particularly US or the eu warships actually turned off their a IS and went dark.
So this is a practice, although a lot of people like to present it as some kind of a nefarious thing if we are gonna think of it as nefarious.
In fact, a lot of ships take take part in this, in this practice of going dark including especially the United States.
In fact, this is in the case of us.
Naval ships has resulted in all sorts of in all sorts of problems collisions indeed with US Navy ships.
Now, in terms of the actual blockade and the effects it's having, I was just looking at the Bloomberg today and forgive me as I read this out, because it was really striking to me.
Bloomberg, which is of course one of the most reliable financial reporting sites anywhere in the world, reports that we are moving from short-term jolt to long-term shock as the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market takes place.
So this is what's happening, and obviously the blockade continues because before the war, before the US and Israeli war on Iran started on the 28th of February somewhere between 140 to 170 ships a day were crossing the Strait of Hormuz.
Now it's only 50 14 to 15.
And one of the things that this has meant is that about 10, 10 million barrels per day of oil supply has been lost.
This includes, although of course, the primary people being punished by this, shortage of oil.
Are the economies in Asia.
In fact, it actually also affects the United States because, Some of the last ships that left the Persian Gulf before the war started were actually, Delivering their supplies now.
So we are going to see the effects of the blockade in the coming week or two.
And apparently one of these ships actually arrived in California because unlike the rest of the United States, California actually does receive oil from the Middle East.
And it it's refineries, Use a medium sour oil a kind of a medium grade and sour meaning high sulur kind of oil that comes specifically from the Middle East.
So the effect of this are of course, being felt incredibly widely.
Another really striking statistic was that an, an actual real world barrel of oil was sold in Sri Lanka at a more than $280 a barrel.
That is double what the price is going elsewhere in the world.
And so, so the effects of this are incredibly, incredibly striking.
What the blockade might mean of course, is that the US will start firing on ships that it assumes are Iranian or carrying oil from Iran or other cargo to Iran.
But of course, if it does so within the context of the ceasefire, it is violating the ceasefire.
And if it does so outside the context of ceasefire, Iran can interpret this as a belligerent action because of course, a blockade is exactly that, Particularly as it is blockading Iran in its territorial waters.
So the state, the, the state that we're in is that of course, we're not getting any reliable or credible kind of reporting from the Trump administration whatsoever.
And the state of play in the region, of course, is that Iran is going to defend itself against this imperial imposition and how it's going to do that remains to be seen.

There is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties.
A huge increase in newer elements of our defenses, development of unrealistic programs to cure every ill in agriculture.
A dramatic expansion in basic and applied research.
These and many other possibilities, each possibly promising in itself may be suggested as the only way to the road we wish to travel.
But each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration, the need to maintain balance in and among national programs, balance between the private and the public economy.
Balance between the cost and hoped for advantages, balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable balance between our essential requirements as a nation and the duties imposed by the nation upon the individual balance between actions of the moment and the national welfare of the future.
Good judgment seeks balance in progress.
Lack of it.
He eventually finds imbalance and frustration.
The record of many decades stands as proof that our people and their government have in the main understood these truths and have responded to them well in the face.
Of threat and stress,

but threats, new and kind or degree, constantly arise.
Of these, I mentioned two, only a vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment.
Our arms must be mighty ready for instant action so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.
Our military organization today bears little relation to that known of any of my predecessors in peace, time, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments.
Industry.
American makers of plowshares could with time and as required make swords as well.
But we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense.
We have been compelled to create a permanent armin industry of vast proportions.
How to, to this?
Three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment.
We annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States corporation corporations.
Now, this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience.
The total influence, economic, political, even spiritual is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government.
We recognize the imperative need for this development, yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications.
Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved.
So is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must car guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought by the military industrial complex, the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.
We should take nothing for granted.
Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Akin to and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial military posture has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, re research has become central.
It also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly.
A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by or at the direction of the federal government.
Today the solitary inventor tinkering in his shop has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields In the same fashion, the free university university, his historically, the fountain head of free ideas and scientific discovery has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research.
Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.
For every old blackboard, there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by federal employment project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet in holding scientific research and discovery in respect as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become.
The captive of a scientific technological elite is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.
Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time.
As we peer into society's future, we, you and I, and our government must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow.
We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage.
We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent fan of tomorrow.

We've just heard clips starting with an excerpt from President Eisenhower's cross of Iron speech in 1956 describing the trade-offs when investing in military buildup.
The briefing examined a leaked Trump video dismissing daycare alongside Senator Chris Van Holland's case that the Iran war was justified by a complete fabrication.
Paul Krugman discussed the global economic fallout that's likely to unfold threatening global farming and energy costs across the board.
The independent described Israel's unprecedented bombing campaign across Lebanon, killing over 250 people and cautioned that continued strikes could derail fragile peace stocks.
Drop site News warned that Iran's demand for any ceasefire to cover all fronts of resistance, including Palestine, makes a workable deal with the US and nearly impossible while Israel keeps bombing Gaza.
Democracy now traced how Iran's proposal to trade oil in Chinese Iran threatens the Petrodollar system, one of the fundamental bases of the US Imperial order since World War ii.
Brendan Miller drew on Baudrillard's essay

to explain Trump's Iran and Venezuela conflicts as hyperreal TV spectacles showing that he cares more about imagery than real objectives.
LBC traced how five weeks of conflict proved that military pressure failed, leaving Iran more hard line and the US holding expanded demands that made any nuclear deal nearly impossible.
And finally, that was Eisenhower's January, 1961 farewell warning against the military industrial complex and its potential to seize, unwarranted influence over government liberties and democratic processes.
And those were just the top takes.
There's a lot more in the deeper dive sections.
But first, a reminder that this show is produced with the support of our members who get this show ad free, as well as early and ad free access to our other show solved, including a members only backstage segment, all via podcast.
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As for today's topic, you just heard excerpts of two of Dwight d Eisenhower's most famous speeches.
In 19 53, 3 months into his presidency, a five star General who led the allied invasion of Europe stood in front of a room full of newspaper editors and said that every gun, every warship, every rocket fired is a theft.
From people who are hungry and cold, and he did the math one.
Bomber costs you 30 schools.
One destroyer costs you 8,000 homes.
This is not a way of life at all in any true sense.
He said it is humanity hanging from across of iron.
Then in 1961, on his way out the door, he warned that the military industrial complex would consume democratic governance if left unchecked.
Both things happened, and Trump just said the quiet part out loud.
On April 1st at an Easter luncheon at the White House, Trump told the room, it's not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things we have to take care of one thing, military protection.
In the budget he released, two days later, he proposed the largest increase in military spending as a share of the economy outside of a ground war in modern American history, one and a half trillion dollars for the Pentagon.
Next year, a 44% increase to pay for it.
His budget cuts the Department of Health and Human Services by 12.5%.
Slashes medical research funding by 5 billion cuts the CDC by a third.
Eliminates the program that helps low income families pay their heating bills and guts.
K through 12 education funding by almost 70%.
And this comes on top of what they already did.
The one giant ugly bill cut nearly a trillion dollars from Medicaid over the next decade since it passed over 800 healthcare facilities across the country have closed cut services or are teetering on the edge.
One third of all rural hospitals in America are now at risk of shutting down and the new budget goes further, eliminating programs specifically designed to stabilize rural hospitals.
Meanwhile, the war operation Epic Fury, the Joint US Israeli military campaign against Iran cost $11.3 billion in its first six days.
According to Pentagon.
Briefings to Congress has been running at hundreds of millions of dollars a day since then.
The Penn Wharton budget model estimates the total could reach 47 billion through April alone with broader economic damage, potentially reaching 210 billion, and that's assuming it stops Six days of bombing Iran costs more than the entire proposed cut to medical research funding.
The daily cost of this war is roughly what it would take to keep multiple rural hospitals open for a year.
But things are more complicated now than in Eisenhower's time.
The direct costs are devastating enough, like the trade off between bombs and hospitals that Eisenhower described.
But we've spent the last 70 years building a global economy, so interconnected, lean, and optimized for a profit and efficiency that a single reckless act can set off a chain of consequences.
The people who started it clearly don't understand.
Now, I'm not an expert on global food systems, but here's who is the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the United Nations Trade and Development Agency, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the American Farm Bureau Federation, and they're all sounding the same alarm.
So here's what they're saying.
About a third of the world's trade fertilizer passes through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula.
Basically, the bottleneck for a huge share of the world's energy and fertilizer.
Since the war started and Iran effectively closed the strait shipping through, it has dropped by over 95%.
The price of a nitrogen fertilizer essential for growing wheat, corn, and rice jumped roughly 50% in the weeks after fighting began.
Countries around the world have reserves of oil, but almost nobody does that for fertilizer.
China's the exception, and they've been drawing down their stockpiles while restricting exports to protect their own farmers.
Beyond that, no strategic reserves, no alternative pipeline, no emergency buffer, and it's because fertilizer is worth less per ton than oil.
So it gets less protection, less infrastructure, less political attention.
We built the global food system, the way we build everything under capitalism, as lean as possible, maximum efficiency, maximum profit, and just hoped nobody would be reckless enough to break it.
This disruption hit right at the start of planting season in the northern hemisphere, which is the worst possible timing.
Farmers are making decisions right now about what's to plant, how much fertilizer they can afford, or whether they can get any at all.
The president of the American Farm Bureau wrote directly to Trump warning that this is a threat to both food security and national security.
Countries like Sudan, Tanzania, and Somalia, which were already struggling, are among the most exposed.
So here's where Eisenhower's accounting falls short, because the globalized economy is the real domino theory, and we are about to put it to the test.
In 1953, you could calculate the cost of a bomber in schools and hospitals.
The trade off was direct.
In 2026, the costs cascaded.
A war launched by two leaders, both trying to stay outta prison, one who treats military operations like television programming, has closed a shipping lane that disrupts the fertilizer supply, that could reduce crop yields, that could drive food prices higher across continents that had nothing to do with the conflict and the system that's supposed to prevent that from happening.
Strategic reserves, stockpiles, international coordination simply doesn't exist for the commodity that actually feeds people.
Now, I'm not predicting famine.
I don't know enough to make that call.
And neither do the people launching the missiles.
That's sort of the point.
The consequences of this war extend so far beyond anything the decision makers considered or are apparently capable of.
Considering that the rest of us are left reading reports from the UN and the Carnegie Endowment trying to figure out how bad it might get.
Eisenhower a five star general looked at this dynamic 73 years ago and called it a theft from people who are hungry, from people who are cold, from children whose futures are being spent on weapons.
He was right in 1953 and he was right in 1961, and the country ignored him both times.
The military industrial complex he warned about didn't just survive.
It won.
It captured the budget, it captured the legislature, it captured the media, and now it has a president who will stand in the White House on Easter Sunday and say out loud that taking care of children is not the government's job, but dropping bombs is the direct costs are a choice.
Someone made a hospital closes in rural America, so a tomahawk missile can launch in the Persian Gulf that part Eisenhower could see coming.
What he couldn't have seen is that 70 years later, the missile would also threaten the fertilizer supply that feeds a billion people because we built a global economy with little margin for error and then handed the controls to people with no interest in understanding what they're breaking.

Note that we've begun putting my commentaries on YouTube, so if you find 'em insightful, check out our channel and share them.
Link in the show notes.
And now we'll continue to dive deeper on six topics today.
First up, section A, Lebanon under attack, followed by section B, the world D idolizes, section C, world economy in peril, section D, the moral WR of war profiteering, section E, the damage our military does, and Section F, making China great again.

It took just 10 minutes for Israel to carry out the biggest atrocity that Lebanon has seen in almost 40 years.
In just a little over 600 seconds, Israel struck more than 100 sites across Lebanon.
On Wednesday, raining 1000 pound bombs down on a densely populated residential area in Beirut in southern Lebanon.
The result was carnage with over 300 people killed, and we knew well over a thousand people.
Residents, as well as Lebanese officials have said that the majority of those killed in injured with civilians, including children and the elderly, the country's prime minister.
Nawaf Salam posted this while we welcomed the agreement between Iran and the United States of America and intensified our efforts to reach an agreement for the ceasefire in Lebanon.
Israel continues to expand its aggressions that have targeted densely populated residential neighborhoods, claiming the lives of unarmed civilians in various parts of Lebanon, particularly in the capsule Beirut.
He list of all regional and international efforts to stop the war, not to mention its utter disregard for the principles of international law and international humanitarian law, which is never respected in the first place, and all friends of Lebanon are called upon.
To help us stop these aggressions by all available means sky News as Alex Crawford spoke to first responders on the scene in Beirut on Thursday.
What did you notice as soon as you arrived here?
It was a devil.
Mm-hmm.
It was a devil.
People is burning as real in what you saw as you arrived, which sounded like a scene no one would want to see.
First I was realizing I arrived to za or to the route.
Mm.
In the same point.
It was the same as a disaster.
Yes.
As, as you put a a, a a piece of burger on a grill, people was grilled.
Really?
The, the, as I tell you, it's not like you see people was grilled.
The one who I pick him up, up.
I, I take him bones.
Bones, all around here, all around here are large residential blocks.
How, how would you describe this area?
Because you are hearing the Israeli military are saying they were specifically targeting Hezbollah infrastructure, command and control centers.
I want to tell all people, all, all world, this world that will tell us there is Hezbollah here in Hezbollah, no Hezbollah as we are a child of, of pirate.
We are not Hezbollah and we are not including for Hezbollah.
And we're not with Hezbollah.
Well, they, there clearly are some Hezbollah elements in the capital city.
If now, if now they tell me that as a Jewish people here and you need our help, we will help.
Mm-hmm.
Our message, it's peace and humanity.
But, but what happened here yesterday, this area, it's food and beverage containers and as we know, as we see it's forec closes container.
Mm-hmm.
There's no military here buried.
Not bay.
It's under.
Community under under government yeah.
Mm-hmm.
But don't take this big for war, that Hezbollah and in Beirut, no, Hezbollah is not in Beirut.
Israel's narrative of targeting Hezbollah in Beirut came under further pressure on News Night.
Nada Maucourant Atallah is a correspondent based in Beirut for the UAE paper, the National, and she began by telling News Night the impact of the brutal Israeli assault.
What it means concretely on the ground, it means that until now you still have people looking for their loved ones.
It means that people were just frantically calling everyone, calling their families because these tracks, they happen in like residential building.
They happen in densely populated area.
And they came with no warning.
They, they did not happen in, Hezbollah affiliated areas.
They did not happen in, in areas, in neighborhoods where the group is influential.
It happens in, in the central in the central of, of Beirut, in, in areas.
You have lots of shops, you have lots of families.
I visited myself, three of those strikes, and there were all residential buildings that were almost completely collapsed, and they all had many victims.
And and rescuers still looking for survivors or just human remains.
Now, Israel claims that it was targeting more than a hundred Hezbollah command centers, and that most of it was inside civilian areas as a part of the hezbollah's strategy of using human shields.
So this all sounds pretty familiar, as do the kinds of sites Israel struck yesterday, including such deadly military centers, such as a funeral, a mosque, a traditional bakery, and even a car wash.
Israel also said it did everything it could do to mitigate harm to civilians.
Atallah was asked if she seen any evidence of that at all.
And they're not providing us with any evidence so they can say whatever they want.
What I see on the ground, I see a family terrorized.
I've seen videos of family jumping out of balconies because they were so scared.
I've seen videos, pictures of of children injured by Shrapnels young, young girl trapped under the rubble.
And this, this is also my city.
I live here.
I've, I've walked on the streets countless time.
I had friends who lived in the very same building one of the very same buildings that wa that was targeted.
So that they should be providing evidence.
And as the fact that the strikes came without warning and also during rush hours.
So it means that the streets were packed.
It has really increased the, the number of, of casualties and especially also the fact that all the strikes came at the same time.
Dalia, when it comes to these strikes, of course, Israel have said, as we mentioned before, they were specifically targeting Hezbollah military command centers, et cetera, et cetera.
Now, for people who dunno, home, there's a thing called the DIA, which is Israel's military strategy of deliberately targeting civilian structures to try and lower the morale of the people.
They're attacking so low that it forces them into capitulation, essentially.
What do you think is more likely the former or the latter?
I mean, that's exactly what what I was gonna, was what I was gonna talk about, the the DIA.
It is the.
Core principle of Israeli military strategy that obviously we saw unfold in Gaza, but it actually originated in 2006 in Beirut.
There's a, an area of Beirut called Dahieh.
And this is when we first saw these, the, the indications of this as a new military strategy by the Israeli state, which is, as you mentioned, Helene, you know, traditionally in warfare, in modern warfare, there is a sense of you have civilian infrastructure, you have hospitals, you have universities, You have residential areas, and you have military infrastructure.
And in a war military infrastructure is vulnerable and is up for being targeted.
And civilian infrastructure in civilians is supposed to be sacrosanct.
Now, the DIA doctrine represents a complete inversion of that, where in fact, you hammer the civilian infrastructure more in fact, than you hammer the, the military infrastructure in order to, as you say, that Helena create, destroy, Civilian morale to force.
There's some kind of bizarre idea that if you cripple a population, then they will be more likely to overthrow their government.
Well, obviously if people are sort of rebuilding their lives from the ashes of nothing I don't think that, you know, forming some kind of organized political force to take over a, from a, an organization that has been in power for, since like the eighties is really gonna be what they have capacity for.
But I also think part of it is a sense of trying to, 'cause one of the issues that Israel has had in Gaza is that no matter how many times they killed Hamas operatives, HAES was just able to replenish itself cons several times over the ranks of Hamas were never actually weakened numerically and.
So I believe Israel makes this calculation where they say, well, look where is Hamas?
Where is Hezbollah able to draw them, their personnel from?
It's from the society.
It's from the community.
And so what we'll do is we will just destroy that society, destroy that community, so that there is no one to draw from.
Now, obviously that is tantamount to genocide and that is what the Dahieh doctrinee is.
So what we have is an incredibly powerful military that is has as its, as its.
Named military strategy, a genocidal one that is specifically targeting the breaking down of a civil society.
And we are not just seeing it in Lebanon, obviously we saw it in Gaza.
We're also seeing it to an extent in Iran.

These strikes happened on, on, on densely populated areas.
They targeted, they happened all across the city.
The Israeli military said they conducted over a hundred strikes.
They happened on the southern suburbs of Beirut, but they also took place in central Beirut in areas, Such as Raya or or Raya.
These are areas that are spread out across Beirut, where, where that are densely populated, where, where tens of people live.
And by the Israeli military's own admission, they were constructing strikes on, on areas populated with civilians.
But under the laws of war parties to a conflict are required to take all feasible pro precautions to protect civilian harms.
But there was no effective or advanced warning ahead of these strikes.
And, and the damage that was done to civilian could be felt on the streets with continuous ambulances stream, I mean into hospitals with chaos as people tried to find their missing loved ones, as people struggled to pull people out of the rubble with children still being stuck in the rubble.
It was, it was it was a disaster that was felt across the city.
Across the country.
I wanted to go back to that quote of the Belgian Foreign Minister.
His name is Maxime Prévot.
He had just arrived in Lebanon.
He wrote on X just before I was commending President Aun for offering to open official negotiations with Israel towards a ceasefire.
Israel launched with no previous warning, one of the most massive strikes since the beginning of the hostilities, allegedly causing hundreds of civilian victims.
We were at the embassy with my delegation, just a few hundred meters from where the missile struck.
This must stop.
The Belgian foreign Minister said the ceasefire between the us, Israel and Iran must include Lebanon.
He said that was the Belgian foreign Minister Ramsey.

I mean indeed all of that took place and I think that.
Well, we, what we witnessed yesterday in terms of the large amount of civilian suffering of the attacks happening on densely populated areas coming without warning, the scale of it was massive.
It was the most it was the, the most deadly day, Since March two in Lebanon.
But the patterns that we've seen the Israeli military follow in their conduct in Lebanon as Inza is not new.
For two and a half years, human rights watch and other rights groups have documented repeated unlawful attacks, war crimes, committed in Lebanon, crimes against humanity, committed in za and acts of genocide, committed inza.
And while all of this was happening, states that were funding Israel, or that continue to funding, Israel continued doing so, arms kept flowing and transiting through countries that continued to provide military assistance to Israel.
Other states such as Israel's allies such as the United States, the uk, Germany, the eu, they have real leverage to stop these atrocities from happening.
These statements of condemnations that are, that are typically issued by, by states after such horrifying days, they, they, they have no effect on the ground, but there is real leverage that states can, can, can, can, can levy, they can immediately suspend armed sales and transfer and military assistance to Israel.
They can levy targeted sanctions against Israeli officials, credibly, implicated, and abuses.
The, the eu, for example, could suspend the trade pillar of its association of its association agreement with Israel.
But we haven't yet seen any effective measures being taken to stop these atrocities.
In fact, the silence of states and the continued flow of weapons has only emboldened Israel, where they're not only continuing to commit unlawful acts, but in fact boasting about it.
In saying that they intend to commit further atrocities.
The response from the international community has been limited to words of condemnation, but no effective action has been taken yet in order to stop these.
Atrocities from happen.
Can you talk about the number of medics who have been killed in Lebanon?
Do you believe medics are being targeted?
What's the number?
Over 50?
Yes over 57, but we don't have the full, we don't have the full number yet because we don't have the, a detailed list of number of medical workers that have been killed yesterday.
But as of the day before that, over 57 medical workers have been killed in Lebanon and Israeli attacks since March two.
If we add that to the total number of medical workers killed since October, 2023, and we're talking about over 250 medical workers killed in Lebanon, These medical workers have been killed in attacks on civil defense centers, on medical vehicles, on hospitals as human rights watch.
We, we and others have documented, Apparently deliberate and repeated attacks on medical workers in their vehicles, in their civil defense centers at hospitals that we found amounted apparent war crimes.
In our investigation, in Amnesty's investigation investigations done by international media outlets such as the Guardians, we didn't find evidence of any of these healthcare facilities, Being used for for, for military purposes in a way that would strip them of their protected status.
And this is a claim that has been repeatedly made by the Israeli authorities without evidence.
The toll is high.
And the, the, the, the, the damage that is conducted by by Israel when it strikes medical workers, isn't just limited to the personnel that are tragically killed.
It has compounding effects on the rest of the country as access to medical access, to aid to healthcare becomes increasingly more limited.
Since March two in Lebanon, six hospitals are, have had to shut down their operations for various reasons.
Three of those hospitals are located south of the Litani, where I mentioned tens of thousands of people live.
And so, increasingly, we're seeing in some places that access to healthcare is being limited, not only by by, by Israeli attacks.
But also because strikes on Bridges are limiting the abilities of hos of hospital of hospital staff to get easy and, and predictable access to medical supplies that they need.
We, we were in Sour last week, last week, and we spoke with the an hospital official at Jal El-Dib, one of the main hospitals in the city.
And they've told us that essentially in order to get supplies after bridges are, have been struck, they've had to take their own cars, drive across the Litani, go to the city of Sidon, which is several kilometers away, I think approximately 30 kilometers away get supplies and come back to, to the hospital, often having to, to do it at night, at great risk to the staff themselves.
Paramedic workers have told us that in order to send supplies into the area south of Litani, they typically wait until injured people are carried into Beirut, across the Litani, so that they send, can send back in those transport vehicle medical supplies that are desperately needed by paramedic staff and, and And, and other healthcare workers.
And so the, the, the strikes on medical workers are taking place.
We've documented, repeated, apparently deliberate attacks on these, on these medical workers.
But there's also an increasing, Increasing attacks that are, that are significantly limiting the ability of people to access healthcare in Lebanon and with the attacks yesterday, I mean, we, I, we saw hospitals quickly becoming overwhelmed with people being rushed in as ambulances streamed into them following the, the scale of the, the attacks and the number of injuries with over a thousand people injured.

As of now, just to throw out some numbers, there's been 1079 deaths in Lebanon, killed by the Israelis at least 118 children.
There's an invasion, an attempted invasion taking place in the South.
They're attacking civilian infrastructure, including bridges, And medical facilities. 128 of them have been attacked, at least 40 medical personnel, though I'm sure that number is a little bit higher now, have been killed by the Israelis.
Many of them in double tap strikes.
I mean, I can go on and on about the horrific destruction they're meeting out against this country right now.
But I think a good place to start would be maybe the basics for our audience.
As you know Hezbollah sort of entered this, this broader regional war with Iran after months of Israeli attacks and ceasefire violations over 15,000 of them.
So I'm curious, Kareem, from your perspective what, explain your perspective of why Hezbollah entered, why now?
How much of it is tied to the broader war with Iran?
How much of it is tied to sort of the domestic problems in Lebanon?

Yeah, no, I think you laid this out very well in terms of introducing how things are in Lebanon.
I think basically this discussion about why Hezbollah started or I, I wouldn't say started the war, I would say escalated because there was a war.
And I think it just, I think the proper term is more that they escalated when they did.
And that's, there's, I think a couple of big reasons.
I think the proximate cause and just in their own words even was, yes, it was after HOWI was, was assassinated in Iran, but really also in terms of militarily and tactically, they wanted to take the initiative because it was fairly clear that the Israeli government had taken a decision.
To themselves launch what they call a preemptive attack on Lebanon, on, on Hezbollah, basically.
So they decided for military and tactical reasons to initiate this before the Israelis were fully prepared to do so.
And, and that's the kind of proximate cause I think as to why Hezbollah entered when it did.
But there's, I mean, I think we can discuss it, but there's of course a much deeper issue here, which is that in the end, the way I see it is that you have a resistance project and you have sort of an Israeli Zionist project an expansionist, settler colony that's there.
And these two projects simply can't coexist in the long term.
They, they're, they are, at least as they have been for these past decades, mutually exclusive projects.
So this business of there being this much larger war that we're seeing today, Is something which I think a lot of people were thinking would happen and maybe thought had happened last year in 2024 and, but, and had finished.
And clearly it hadn't, Hezbollah had been preparing themselves for this war.
And, and perhaps this is that this, the, the the so-called final war, I mean, it would seem like it, it seems like to an existential war for many actors, including Iran, and, and we can get to to, to that in a bit.
But I, I think also it's interesting to see all these sort of think tankers and analysts, Chime in, especially from DC.
Because, and I maybe I was guilty of this too, in a way.
I think there was a perception after 2024 that Hezbollah had been severely degraded.
And I mean, you look at what happened, right?
They, the Israelis killed the entire senior leadership and the organization came out of that 2024 war.
Seemingly defeated.
It, it was a loss.
It was a loss in many ways.
All that said, I think watching now what's taking place, we're seeing Hezbollah behave and respond to the Israelis in a way that definitely challenges that perception of them as having basically been defeated.
So I guess from your perspective, you know, do you look at what's happening and do you see Hezbollah's have, having been rebuilt and how do you think their capacity now as, as we're watching this war play out?
How does that compare to what we saw in 2024?
Yeah, I think it's, I think it's absolutely fair to say that most people in Lebanon, and it seems that in Israel as well assume that Hezbollah had been defeated in the kind of, in the big sense of being able to pose any kind of threat to the Israelis themselves as opposed to a kind of internal force where still they they had influence within the country itself, but not as an external threat to the Israelis.
And certainly not in any kind of, that they had no deterrence vis-a-vis any kind of Israeli attacks.
I think that it's fair to say that most of us, and most people kind of assume that it's clear that what happened since that November 2024, not even a ceasefire, cessation, hostilities agreement that took place we, we saw that on the Israeli side, there were 15,000 recorded violations by the UN and by the Lebanese government.
It's, it's clear, and on our side or Lebanon side, there was literally zero violations across the border from Hezbollah or the Lebanese side.
Towards the Israeli side, there was zero violations as opposed to over 15,000 violations.
In the meantime, the the idea of the, the main, let's say, responsibility of the Lebanese government was to, and, and Hezbollah, was to say, okay, we're gonna disarm and remove at least the heavy weapons and most of the weapons south of the Litt River, and at least move it to the north and then north of the Litani River, there would be a second phase.
Or that would be negotiated and there, you know, there'd be some kind of discussion.
The reality is that for the most part, for the most part, the Lebanese army, which did deploy to the border areas and to, to most of South Lebanon and did take control over a lot of the, the key kind of points that Hezbollah had their bases on.
They there there was disarming.
In other words, the vast majority of Hezbollah's weapons were removed from South Lebanon.
That seems to be clear.
The Army had certified that, that the vast bulk of them had been removed, except in areas that Israelis retained control.
Because remember, Israel was supposed to have withdrawn as part of this agreement.
Mm-hmm.
They were supposed to have withdrawn from all of the occupied land, and they didn't, they retained several points that they said they were going to keep obviously strategic locations that they were going to keep.
They did not allow, I think there's around 60,000 or 60, at least 60,000 you know, civilians from returning to their villages, which is what they were supposed to have done according to this agreement.
So they were, they were clearing out, they were not going to allow in this, in a 2, 3, 4 kilometer zone.
Along the border.
The Israelis were not allowing people back.
They were not withdrawing their, their, their forces from the key points that they had taken.
And so what Hezbollah was doing in this period, which was around 15 months or so, was on the one hand, according to what they own, say they were giving the Lebanese government a chance to negotiate the withdrawal of the Israelis and a kind of more permanent agreement.
On the other hand, in reality, they understood that would not happen.
So they were preparing themselves and preparing themselves for this war that has now come, and it's very clear that they have prepared in a way that has taken everybody by surprise.
The level of professionalism.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
The level of professionalism, the level of weapons that they have the, the way in which they prepared the tactically militarily, they're, they're doing a job, which I don't think anybody would've expected.
And I, and this is what we're seeing today, and I think the Israeli response.
Which is what they always do.
It's just to say, okay, we take something.
And since we can't really understand what's going on immediately, we're just gonna destroy everything in our zone.
We're gonna threaten by saying, we're going to put 450,000 soldiers and reservists and whatever, at, at at the border.
And we're going to invade Lebanon up to the Litani River, if not even north of that, and we're gonna destroy everybody and we're gonna depopulate the entire country.
And basically, literally say that they're going to create sort of Gaza type conditions in, in chunks of South Lebanon.
But in reality, that's not gonna stop Hezbollah now.
And, and this is connected to the larger regional war that Iran has.
That includes Iran.

Next, section B, the world de idolizes.

Chinese vessels have reportedly been permitted to pass through the strait.
China imports about 40% of its oil from the Middle East and has been one of the largest buyers of Iranian oil.
There are also reports that the Iranians are suggesting they'd consider allowing a small number of oil tankers to pass through the strait if the oil cargo is traded in Chinese Yuan rather than US dollars.
If you could comment on that.
This is really fascinating because of course we know that the fundamental basis of the US Imperial Orders since the end of the Second World War has been on the one hand petroleum.
And on the other hand, the US dollar the the, the Globe's production and finance worlds are dependent on the petroleum that the US has guaranteed the flow of since the end of the Second World War.
And which until the nationalization of oil in the 1970s and eighties basically controlled something like 60% of the the world's oil reserves after nationalization, that percentage dropped dramatically.
But the US dollar continues to be on the financial channels that the US has crafted, continue to be a very significant bolster for the empire.
So the fact that Iran is actually looking for alternatives to the dollar in order to challenge the Petrodollar regime, which is as I said, one of the fundamentals of the US empire is a really interesting and quite clever, Indication of how the Iranians are hoping to influence the crafting of a world post this war or a new world order, post this war where there is a multipolar financial system where, for example, the dollar is no longer a single currency that rules the world, and the US is the only channel that control, or the only power that controls financial channels because of course, the US has used this this inordinate power to strong arm various states to institute sanctions to make it difficult for its enemies, for example, to purchase oil as, and, and of course to, to, it has used it to coerce a lot of countries as we see, for example, in the case of Cuba or Iran or indeed Russia to to do its bidding.
So the fact that Iran is calling for Petro Yuans to.
Come become an alternative to petro dollars is actually quite significant.
Also in indicating that the Iranians are well aware of how extensively the US has used its course of sanction capabilities through its control of the financial channels and through its, Mastery of the petrodollar and are trying to erode that power.
And Professor Khalili the US is now the world's largest oil producer, but because oil is a globally priced commodity, the price goes up in the US if the world market price goes up, but that's right.
How important do you think this might be in Trump's calculation?
Because another consideration, another aspect of this may be that as oil supplies diminish from the Middle East, the US could benefit because it is the world's largest oil producer and the price of its oil will go up and the demand for its oil.
Absolutely.
What a fantastic question because in fact, we have seen that when the Russian invasion of Ukraine began and, The Nord stream gas, natural gas pipelines to Europe were sabotaged.
We now there, there are now indications that this may have been done at the behest of the US and its Ukrainian allies.
But nevertheless, when that sabotage happened, it actually translated into massive gains for us natural gas production.
The thing is that there are a number of reasons why oil is not, why the US cannot become the sole oil producer for the whole of the world.
One is the question of proximity, for example.
The second is the question of capacity that the US has in order to actually replace, for example, the oil that is produced by Saudi Arabia or by Iran, or indeed by Russia.
But the third factor, and I think that this is the one that I think we should look out for, is that in the last 10 or 15 years, China has actually begun generating a, an alternative set of fuels sustainable fuels and developing technologies particularly of electric electric and battery technologies that will allow for, for example, solar or wind energy to displace, fossil fuels.
And the more that the price of oil goes up, which of course we have seen that happen, as you mentioned earlier.
And in fact this also translates into major windfall.
For US oil companies, this oil prices going up, benefits Chevron, it benefits Exxon.
It doesn't benefit the average, US citizen at the petrol stations, at the gas stations, but it does benefit the oil company.
So it definitely does, that does happen.
But the higher the price of oil goes up, the, the, the relatively cheaper it becomes to actually have sustainable alternatives, which of course that means that it benefits China in a major way since China is way ahead of the rest of the world in, Producing these technologies and in producing them cheaply.
So the solar panels that are being produced in China are a fraction of the price of solar panels that were being produced something like 15 or 20 years ago.
And I think this shift is actually, Is, is a major long term concern for the oil companies.
So in the short term, they're taking all the windfall that they can get.
But this again, is that the kind of a post-war order that we will see will likely also have major implications for the kind of energy people are willing to use.
Actually,

for 80 years, the United States sat on the throne of economic power as the world's reserve currency and hegemonic superpower.
I mean, look, others have grown.
Some have even kind of closed the gap.
But so long as the world's business is done in the universal language of the US dollar, we are an immovable force.
We're part of everything inexorably intertwined with global trade, whether people like it or not.
Now, holding onto this exorbitant privilege as it's referred to, is literally the easiest thing to do.
I mean, to lose it, we'd have to turn on our allies.
Start unprovoked wars, cut off the flow of immigration to the United States to take an extremely xenophobic stance, withdraw from trade deals and alliances and global organizations, place egregious tariffs on every country in the world, even if they're only inhabited by like penguins, right?
You'd have to eliminate poverty and health funding to developing nations, hoard wealth and resources, and kind of generally go out of our way to piss off everybody from Canada to Japan.
But it would do that, right?
I mean, what country would literally self-sabotage to this degree?
What citizens of said country would vote for somebody who promised explicitly to do all of those things?
I mean, it wouldn't happen.
It's all, it's all hypothetical.
It is a big theoretical exercise.
Just that would be, whew.
Oo.
Oh God.
But you know what?
For shits and giggles, let's just game it out.
So we've talked about the BRICS before, right?
Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.
These are the original five economies who banded together because they saw this writing on the wall.
Now, Indonesia is the most recent entrant, but there are others who are affiliated, who are quickly filling in the map like Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the UAE Now taken together, they represent more than half of the world's population, and they've been quietly and methodically building an alternative to the Western dominated financial order.
And another thing that these nations have in common is that the United States has now placed aggressive tariffs on every single one of these nations.
That's not a coincidence.
It's a pattern.
And it's not just adversaries like Russia and China.
We're talking about India, a natural ally and a country with deep historical ties to the West, and they're absolutely livid at the Trump administration's trade posture.
And India just took over the Bris chairmanship from Brazil for 2026.
And what did they do?
Immediately?
They unveiled their agenda.
Now, forget about climate initiatives or cultural exchanges.
This is about payment systems, financialization, deep economic coordination, the kind of boring technocratic technical infrastructure that most people tune out, but literally runs the world.

So that brings us to December, 2025.
What exactly did they announce in this extremely pivotal month?
The unit, not Randy Johnson, not a euphemism, but a digital currency backed 40% by physical gold and 60% by a basket of bricks currencies.
So the al, the Yuan, the rupe ruble, and the rand all weighted equally in a basket.
So if we think back to some of our other coverage from last year, this might sound like a stable coin, but it's not exactly that.
It's stablecoin adjacent, let's say.
But a normal stable coin like tethers, USDT or circles USDC promises you redemption.
You can always swap your token for actual dollars because they're backed by dollars one to one.
And that redeem ability is the whole point.
It's the anchor.
The bricks unit is explicitly non redeemable.
You can't just walk up to a window and exchange your units for gold bars or rubles.
It's designed to track that basket of assets to provide a stability relative to those reserves, like what is the quantifiable value of the transaction, but there's no redemption mechanism.
Think of it more as John Maynard Kane's Bank or idea that got overruled, that Bretton Woods.
It would be a unit of account used for international clearing.
So everybody has the same notion of what the value is.
So the gold and the bricks currencies stabilize the valuation, but they don't create a direct redemption channel.
So this is a wholesale settlement asset, not a retail token.
Banks and governments will use it to settle cross-border trade payments, but individuals won't be using it to buy coffee.
But here's where it gets really interesting.
Every Bricks Nation already is independently moving toward digital transactions internally.
So in India's UPI, which is Unified Payments Interface, is revolutionizing how money already moves within the world's most populous country.
We've talked about China before and how they've been piloting a digital yuan for years.
Every one of these countries has something similar to that inside their own infrastructures.
Now to be clear, these aren't just payment apps.
This is fundamental infrastructure, and the unit is designed to sit on top of all of them, creating a unified rail system that connects these digital ecosystems together.
So BRICS Pay is the messaging and the settlement network that links all of these national systems with a decentralized messaging layer.
This is their answer to SWIFT, the international payment Transfer System built on the dollar.
These nations, some of our allies included, are building an alternative to SWIFT, not tomorrow, not in some hypothetical future.
Right now,

Iran is now directly challenging the most powerful tool of the US Empire, which is the global dominance of the US dollar.
The fact that the United States is the only country on earth that can print dollars, which is the global reserve currency, gives the US an exorbitant privilege so the US can maintain massive deficits with the rest of the world.
The best way to measure this is to look at the US balance of payments, and in particular, the current account, which looks at transactions between the US and the rest of the world.
And the US maintains enormous trade deficits with the rest of the world.
The US current account deficit is around $1 trillion every year, $1 trillion.
The reason that the US does not face an inflation crisis like many global south countries with chronic current account deficits such as Argentina or Pakistan.
The reason that the US doesn't face the massive depreciation of its currency and high rates of inflation is because it has this exorbitant privilege of printing the global reserve currency.
And every other country on earth needs dollars in order to pay for imports of oil, which is the most important global commodity.
And almost all oil is traded in dollars, at least historically, until quite recently.
Along with other important commodities.
All these other countries need to get access to dollars, which maintains this artificial demand for US dollars.
And Iran recognizes this.
This is why Teran is now directly challenging the Petrodollar system, which is an important pillar of global US dollar hegemony.
In the past few years, the D Dollarization movement has been picking up steam.
More and more countries have been seeking alternatives to the dominance of the US dollar, and even major western media outlets, especially the financial press, have been warning that as the Financial Times put it, great power conflict puts the dollar's exorbitant privilege under threat.
And a big reason for this is because the US Empire has weaponized the dollar.
The US has imposed illegal unilateral sanctions on one third of all countries.
And in 2022, with the proxy war in Ukraine, the US and European countries crossed the Rubicon.
They took a step way too far, and they seized $300 billion of dollar denominated and Euro denominated assets belonging to Russia's central bank.
These were the reserves of Russia and this scared countries all around the world and central banks all around the world because they said, wow, if the West can seize the reserves of Russia, which is a major power, a very powerful country, then they could easily seize the reserves of much smaller countries.
This has led to an acceleration in the de Dollarization of the foreign exchange reserves held by central banks around the world, especially in global south countries.
And now even Western media outlets are warning that the dollar is losing its credibility, and central banks are instead buying more and more gold.
This is why the price of gold has been absolutely skyrocketing.
It has tripled since 2023, and gold has in fact become the biggest asset held in the reserves of central banks around the world overtaking US Treasury securities, US government debt, which is going to cause a lot of problems for the US government.
Because a smaller and smaller share of US government debt is being bought by foreign investors.
In 2015, about one third, 34% of US treasury securities were held by foreign investors.
A decade later, it's now around 24%.
And over time, it's secularly decreasing, which means that it's likely that borrowing costs for the US government are going to increase the yields on US.
Treasury securities will likely increase over the long term.
But now let's bring in the question of the petro dollar of global oil sales in dollars.
Because still the dollar is used in 80% of global oil sales.
It's not 100%.
It used to be close to 100% just a few years ago.
But due to the Western sanctions on Russia, and Russia is a major oil producer, and now Russia is selling its oil to other countries in other currencies, not the US dollar.
This meant that in 2023, about 20% of global oil sales were in other currencies, not the dollar.
And now Iran is demanding that countries that want to send tankers through the straight of Horus have to sell their oil in Chinese Yuan.
So what will the figure be in 2026 or 2027 or the years that come?
Will it be 30%, 40% that is sold in other currencies, not the US dollar?
Let's not forget that 20%.
Of the global oil supply flows through the Strait of Hormuz.
So if Iran succeeds in de Dollarizing, even half of that, that is 10% of the global oil trade.
That is massive.
And that means that there will be less demand for the US dollar by other countries, which will increase inflationary pressure in the US and cause interest rates to increase, it'll cause yields on US treasuries to go up, which will put more pressure on the central bank, the Federal Reserve, to raise interest rates or risk higher inflation, which could cause a political backlash.
This is precisely why the US government is so afraid of de dollarization.
This is why Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened Bris countries and said, if they try to challenge the global dominance of the US dollar, he will punish them with 100% tariffs.
Trump has repeated this threat many times, and he did put 50% tariffs on Brazil and India.
Two founding members of Bris and Trump also at one point threatened tariffs of 145% against China.
Another founding member of Bris and the US and Russia basically don't have trade with each other due to the Western sanctions over the war in Ukraine.
So this is not just empty rhetoric.
Trump has threatened all of these countries.
He also threatened South Africa with high tariffs and other measures.
But in reality, what all of this is likely to do is to accelerate de Dollarization and Iran has been at the vanguard, at the forefront of de Dollarization for well over a decade.
Back in 2012, the Iranian government announced that it was selling oil to China in Renminbi, in Yuan not, and US dollars.
This has been going on for well over a decade now.
Moreover, China and Russia have d Dollarized, basically all of their bilateral trade.
And China is buying oil and other commodities from Russia in a mixture of Chinese Yuan and Russian rubles.
D Dollarization in China has been picking up steam in recent years, especially after the Western sanctions on Russia in 2022.
And now a slight majority, a bit over half of the cross border transactions in China are conducted using its own currency, r and b, not the US dollar.
And this trend is only going to continue in the upcoming years.

Now Section C, world economy in peril.

The reason why the US, of course not to do what kind of imperialism 1 0 1 here, but it's the reason why the US is so powerful is primarily because of the fact that they have this global reserve currency, which is the dollar.
You see a dramatic shift away from that.
So the dollar petro dollar becomes central in us.
Asserting its global.
He hegemonic power.
You're seeing an active and a passive move away from that.
So you're seeing an active move away from that in the fact that Iran says, we will trade it in non-US denominated currencies, the Chinese r and b.
And so you're seeing that already beginning and you're seeing the fact that if the oil doesn't circulate globally, and so the Americans have come out and said we will protect our oil.
And the Russians have come out and said that we'll protect our oil.
And, and, and so what that does is slowly move us away from that kind of global world order.
And it's also the fact that the American bases are being destroyed and those likely won't be rebuilt or rebuilt to the same capacity because the whole deal was you provide this protection and we'll allow you to have bases and lots of power here.
So in both regards, you'll see a weakening of that power that begins the reduction of, of economic power.
So there's that at the kind of hegemonic level.
But at the practical level, it's not just, we're not just talking about oil, we're talking about fertilizer.
We're talking about a lot of different products that that need to be circulated, that won't, that will also affect the Americans.
Of course, we're also talking about global inflation.
Once oil reaches, let's say 1 50, 200, let's say let by April, may, June, who knows, that affects inflation everywhere.
So that inflationary costs will be baked into every country, and that will be baked into the American economy as well.
So the American economy of, of all the economies is the most global of the economy.
So the idea that it'll somehow be in inoculated or insulated from the impacts of this is just, is, is fantasy.

I think that's such an important point.
And I think we can see it from the White House is Iran is, is totally destroyed every single day.
There's phantom convoys that are being declared that are gonna be moving people through the straits of horror moves.
I mean, seemingly try to manipulate markets through these various things, but all of it seems to be a little bit of an illusion.
I mean, I'm no military expert, but, You hear Iran's missiles were totally destroyed, and then there's like four boies of missiles towards Israel, like the 15 minutes after they say that.
So, I mean, it does seem that whether they underestimated them or not, that, It's, it's a, a false dawn, this idea that somehow Iran is like, Imminently collapsing here.
Yeah, no, of course.
Look, we know the kind of munitions that exist in the Gulf States.
We know what the munitions that exist in many different contexts because they're directly done by the US and they're kind of public contracts, et cetera.
There is no idea the missile capacity in Iran.
Right?
What we know right now is that Iran hasn't sent a single cruise missile.
And the CIA report alone says that they have over a thousand cruise missiles.
We know that.
We know that they have, and this is the CIA report between 40 and 80,000 Shahidrones, they have sent, sent out less than 3000.
So the capacity here is in question where people misunderstood, and I think certainly the Americans did.
I'm not so certain that the Iranian, The Israelis did as much.
They try to rope the Americans into this potentially.
But is that during the 12 day war, they gave forewarning and they sent in older models.
None of the new ones that we're seeing ha be sent out right now.
And so that might have misled or a given the west a sense that they could just dominate.
And so you see this come out even in the way that Trump speaks.
He says, oh, we'll take control of the straight of war moves.
You can physically go there.
You can't take control because it's not a military that you're taking control because the missiles are the ones that cannot be necessarily controlled.
It was the same kind of rhetoric that happened during Yemen when the Red Sea blockade happened.
Biden and Trump said, oh, they, we'll go there and take it over.
But the missiles kept coming and because the missiles kept coming, no shifts could cross because the liabilities are too high.
So private companies aren't going, even if they were insured by the Americans, even if they could get an escort by the American military, they couldn't, they wouldn't do it.
So the idea that somehow they're gonna use conventional weapons, they're gonna use conventional fleets and and somehow overwhelm them.
Well, the preponderance of evidence shows that they're not able to do that.
It's a new form of war.
And the missiles and the, and the, and the drone swarms keep coming.
And there, it, it doesn't seem like there's any end sight.
And you also had local production.
It's not just mosaic structure that they, that we're talking about with Iran, where different, different groups have different sections, have different forms of autonomy.
It's also that they were producing domestically using sort of domestic products locally in underground tunnels.
So there's no way of knowing for the Americans and the Israelis to know where, where, and how this will stop.
And that's one of the reasons why they've kept going back and, and asking for negotiations just to restart.
That doesn't come from a place of confidence.
It comes from a face place of fear.

Let's say the war ended today.
I mean, I wish it would, right?
But let's say it ended today.
How much damage has already been done?
Because we're looking at, you know, I think we're hearing estimates of like at least three more weeks.
And I mean, that could be longer, but at least three more weeks already.
In just three weeks, a lot of damage has been done.
So walk us through like what the damages so far, and then how much worse can it get if this goes on another month, months?
Okay, so there's two things.
I think the first part is around the, the amount of infrastructure and American bases that have been destroyed.
Those bases, I think will potentially, some of them will be rebuilt.
Some of them won't be rebuilt, but they won't be built to the same capacity.
The second part is the infrastructure that's been destroyed, that leads to massive disinvestment because the potentiality of another attack is always looming.
Before this, it was just threats.
Iran was making threats and people felt like there wasn't, there weren't necessarily concrete now and into the foreseeable future.
That risk has been baked into every decision that'll be made in the Middle East.
Certainly when we talk about Dubai, for example, it was seen as a safe space, a place where people can go and invest and, and get some nice sun.
And it was just, that is gone.
There's, there's very little likelihood of that, despite the best efforts of the UAE to try and change the narrative.
So that, that's the first point.
The second one is around the US military.
It will be very difficult for the foreseeable future for the Americans to lead a large scale conventional war.
This is especially at the weakened position they're in.
I mean, this is precisely why Scott Bessent, the US Treasury Secretary just today came out and said, well, Russian oil we're unsanctioned it and we'll potentially unsanctioned, they might have just unsanctioned Iranian oil.
Let's see.
What does that tell us?
Partly it tells us that, that, They're terrified of the prospect of global shortages.
And not only the, the effect on the economy, the reaction to the Americans, I mean, Israelis, you know, the, the negative reaction will be a long-term impact.
But also they are trying, and I believe this, I don't know if it's, but I suspect that it's kind of a massive fig leaf to the Iranians to say, okay, this is on the table.
We will potentially, we're serious about getting rid of sanctions against Iran.
I imagine that's what it is.
And so I think that the long-term impact of this is both at, again, at the hegemonic level, but also at the very practical level.
You have to understand that these, these oil tankers get to the US after two weeks.
So they're not even seeing the impacts of this necessarily.
The Americans, they make sweet cr, they, they produce sweet crude, but they transport that.
They take crude from, from from Canada, and, and they refine that and they take it from Venezuela and they refine that.
So there, it's not like they're producing the US and necessarily selling the American markets.
So the, the impact on it, even if the America is, if even if America is a producer, again, they're not gonna be insulated from this, they're still gonna see an impact.
The question is will it, will it continue for three weeks?
If it happens, continues for three weeks?
There's no telling what'll happen.

This is where modern monetary theory was supposed to be comforting because MMT tells us that a sovereign that issues its own fiat currency can never quote, run out of money.
And under the MMT framework, the true economic constraint isn't debt to GDP.
It's inflation deficits are manageable as long as you're not pushing the economy beyond its capacity to produce.
And should inflation eventually show up.
You can use things like taxes and regulation to cool things off.
But Trump's deregulatory and tax cut regime serves to starve this solution.
And the biggest inflation driver is oil.
So even MMT economists are crystal clear on one thing.
Printing money or running deficits becomes inflationary once you hit real resource constraints.
When there are no more, let's say, skilled workers or spare capacity, like no more barrels of oil to allocate, because in that world, extra spending just bids up prices.
Well, welcome to that world.
Not even MMT can save us now.
So to stay inside the MMT guardrails, the US would have to offset war spending with big tax heights or spending somewhere else, and it would have to clamp down on private demand with things like rationing or price controls or forced saving like explicit war bonds that soak up purchasing power.
In other words, we'd have to act like a serious wartime state with a mobilization economy and shared sacrifice instead, where a fiscally dominant, politically fractured empire that spent the past decade convincing itself deficits don't matter, and that every war can be put on the credit card forever.
Now, gaming this out, let's get more concrete about how this plays.
The obvious risk is an oil shock with immediate inflation at the pump, and it eventually works its way into the goods economy.
And this kind of shock shows up literally everywhere.
This scenario can be found in all post Britain era conflicts.
The difference here is that this is more than a disruption with time limits on it because Iran is going after core oil and natural gas infrastructure.
And why is that?
I don't know.
Maybe because we murdered their supreme leader and a building full of school children.
A scorched earth economic response shouldn't necessarily come as a surprise.
Now, under normal circumstances, the Fed could jack rates to crush inflation like Volcker, or it could slash them to cushion a recession like they did under Greenspan, but in a period of fiscal dominance, we're kind of damned if we do or damned if we don't. 'cause keeping rates high would make borrowing costs explode precisely.
By the way, at the time when the private credit market trouble is beginning to boil over into the real economy, because a lot of these shadow banking deals are variable rate deals that are tied to market rates.
So this would force seismic defaults throughout the entire economy.
Now, on the other hand, cutting rates like Trump has been pushing for since day one, further anchors inflation above target, which in turn crushes consumer demand, and there's no guarantee that it positively impacts the borrowing and financing activity.
Given the amount of uncertainty and volatility surrounding this administration's actions.
Just because you loosen up some requirements and lower rates doesn't mean that banks are automatically going to lend if they think that there's too much of a risk premium in the market.
And what you went wind up with then is a hesitant whipsaw Central Bank with no clear path forward.
So you kind of take them out of the mix.
Meanwhile, the treasury is stuck with an expanding deficit financing issue with higher rates on the short end of the yield curve.
Without meaningful tax heights hikes, which is anathema to every administration in the past 50 years.
Like Trump is not special in this regard.
He's just extreme.
It means that a flood of new treasury issuances into debt markets that are already beginning to question US economic hegemony.
So again, if we game this out, the administration will likely have to incentivize IE pressure banks to hold more US treasuries and maybe even engage in yield curve control.
To keep the long end of the yield curve from running away, the Fed will have to expand use of its repo facilities to backstop liquidity in the market.
And these responses are all well and good in terms of providing market stability in the banking sector, but it does nothing to address the concerns in the real and consumer economy because it leads to inflation and a tighter credit environment.
And those two things always never not lead to a deep recession.
The balance sheet of the United States is in a completely different position than it was during prior wartime periods.
That's the whole point here.
And the fiscal and regulatory stance of this administration means that the consumer is the one who will ultimately be on the hook.
And no amount of energy, independent supply and increased stockpiles of oil at home will matter to global crude and natural gas prices.
Because oil is fungible, it's traded globally now.
War is stupid under nearly every circumstance.
In fact, Trump from one year ago, and pretty much the rest of his professional life would tell you the same thing.
And in the past and in theory, we had the top minds in the military and the administration to help us navigate war efforts.
That still resulted in inflation, recessions and financial crises.
So what chances do you think we have with this collection of MIS grants?
Fools and Sants, they're not even wearing shoes that fit as it was.
Those cycles played out in a world where US hegemony was unquestioned and the debt interest dynamic wasn't yet on a knife's edge.
Today's circumstances are totally different.
Any recessionary plunge triggered by this conflict will likely be deeper and harder to climb out of because of fiscal dominance, because of diminished faith in the US dollar, and a desire to break ties with a country that elected a madman, not once but twice, this could go down as the single biggest self-inflicted wound of any US President.
The moment when Washington in defense of an already fragile hegemony triggers the very chain of events that ends it because the world isn't just gonna sit idly by while the United States shuts off one fifth of the global fucking oil supply.
I mean, China's building a blue water Navy and deepening economic ties across the global South.
Russia, despite its own disasters, is still at the grownups table with nukes energy and diplomatic leverage.
Europe finally learning that the US is now a rogue undependable partner, willing to weaponize everything from payment systems to shipping lanes.
So the end state is easy to sketch.
The US is reduced from global spanning hegemon to a regional hemispheric power first among equals in the Americas.
Maybe while new and old players China, a bruised but resilient Russia and increasingly autonomous Europe and a more assertive global south.
Cobbled together a more multipolar order, not because they beat us on some imaginary battlefield, but because we blew a hole in our own economic hole and theirs at the same time, and they finally decided that they had enough.
That's how this ends, and the process in between here, and that is a very painful one where we find ourselves in second, third, maybe a lower place.
Are you prepared for that?
Is anyone?

This is the global oil supply.
It's all sold in one big market, and that means all the producers sell to that same global supply.
And then all the oil consuming countries buy from that same supply.
You could also call these exporters and importers.
It's the same idea anyway, the Iran War cut off one fifth of global supply.
So when delivery stops showing up at those countries, we talked about they can't actually buy from other producers, but they've got to do it by outbidding, whoever would've bought that oil otherwise.
And that pushes up the price for everyone.
And that's even hitting places like the US where we are still receiving oil from before the war started.
Countries whose shipments ran out are creating this big surge in demand.
So anytime you go to the pump or pay your power bill, you are bidding against them and they are bidding against you.
And all of this is going to get significantly worse when China and Europe start running out of shipments too.
And surge demand to replace.
Which is really close to happening.
But all of this raises a question.
If these shortages are just days or weeks from reaching everywhere, then why are we on a lull?
Every government in the world can see that same map that I showed you earlier.
They know catastrophe is bicycling their way.
So why doesn't it feel like it?
This is Trump.
A couple of weeks into the war, sir, could you first see a deal in Iran this upcoming week?
I do see a deal in Iran.
Yeah.
Mr.
President could be sued when he said this.
The price of oil dropped right away.
Wars ending, right?
Everything back to normal.
Except he'd been saying the same thing for weeks.
We have had very, very strong talks.
We'll see where they lead.
We have points, major points of agreement.
I would say almost all points of agreement.
Iran has said that there are no talks and Trump is making it all up.
Iran's foreign ministry says you're not telling the truth when it comes to productive conversations down end the world.
They're gonna have to get themselves better public relations people.
He's been doing a ton of this like a few days earlier he'd posted the US was very close to meeting its objectives in the war and might soon start winding down.
So why does he keep doing this?
Well, to understand, go back to that graphic of the global oil market.
We left something out before.
A lot of oil gets bought up by speculators who sell it secondhand.
This all takes place through something called an oil future.
It sounds scummy, but it actually serves a pretty useful function in stabilizing prices.
It doesn't matter how it works.
The point is those speculators set their price by what they think oil will cost in the future.
Which means if Trump comes along and says, peace in our time, speculators conclude prices will drop and sell their oil futures for cheap, which helps to balance the price rise in the regular market.
That's part of the lull.
Even though econ 1 0 1 says oil prices should be going up way more than they have like.
Crisis level, six, $7 a gallon territory.
All of this market manipulation is tamping those prices down.
But that sounds good, right?
Except that it means that the global economy is consuming oil and gas as if they were still priced and flowing.
Normally, it's like if your city were running out of water and everybody in town decided to take two showers a day.
And there's another thing propping up this weird artificial lll that we're in.
IE countries have unanimously decided to launch the largest ever release of emergency oil stocks in our agencies history.
Remember earlier when I said that all countries keep oil stockpiles while a bunch of those countries got together recently and agreed to sell off 400 million barrels from their reserves?
That's like if 200 of those oil super tankers suddenly materialized outta the Bermuda Triangle all at once.
And then on top of that, the US also agreed to allow Russia, and this is kind of hard to believe, Iran to sell off some of their sanctioned oil and releasing these stockpiles has added oil to the market equivalent to about half of what was cut off by the war, which has helped to balance out supply and prices and all of that.
But here's the catch, and it's a big one, the stockpile release and those speculator games, these are both one-off tricks.
They only work for a few weeks and when they're used up, they're gone.
Man, that artificial lull that we have been holding up, it is gonna come crashing to an end just as those last shipments of Middle Eastern oil dry up the final, Vessel carrying jet fuel into the United Kingdoms gonna get here in 48 hours and there's no more after that.
So when that oil shark hits.
Is going to hit us all at once.
Okay, so now we understand what that oil shock is, how it's gonna get here, how it's forming, what is it gonna look like.
When people picture this, they tend to talk about it in terms of rising prices. $200 barrel oil, $8 a gallon at the pump, a thousand dollars domestic flights.
But this misses something much larger and much more consequential that is already starting to happen.
To understand what that is, imagine if instead of talking about energy supplies, we were talking about food.
Now if I told you that one or 2% of the world's food supply was going offline, you probably worry.
You might see food prices go up, some, some hardships on the margin, but you would think it's basically survivable.
But now, if I told you the world was losing, had already lost 20% of its food supply, you would think, well, we are about to have fewer people on earth.
The name for this is demand destruction.
It's when the supply of something drops so severely that whoever or whatever relies on it, the demand permanently withers away.
And that is what is going to happen to any global economic activity that uses energy, which is like almost all of it factories, technological development and production, car and airplane travel, air conditioning, building homes or cities.
I'm not saying that those things are going to go away, but there is going to be a lot less of them, like about 20% less.
Once things really bottom out.
The economic shocks caused by this war will be with us for months.
How we emerge from this crisis will define us.
For a generation.
Let me give you a few specifics that are already starting to manifest.
Airlines say they cannot afford to operate and are shutting down many of their flights, so it'll be harder to explore the world.
European governments are telling their citizens not to travel for vacation this summer.
There's just not enough fuel for it.
A number of factories are already closing worldwide, especially in Asia.
Semiconductor factories in particular are closing both for lack of power, and because semiconductors use helium, which is a byproduct of natural gas production, so is also going away, importers expect it to become prohibitively expensive to ship some things abroad, so we'll have fewer foreign goods, less off season produce, and we'll export less too.
So fewer jobs, construction supplies like lumber are getting too expensive to harvest or import, which means fewer homes getting built, which means existing homes getting more expensive and harder to afford.
Many of the essential components to fertilizer also come through the Persian Gulf.
Things like phosphorus, there are already fertilizer shortages in Asia, so yeah, there will also be less food in the world.
All of these things also contribute to inflation.
Prices go up harder to afford things.
Our standard of living goes down, and the thing is, even if the wars today, this process, this demand destruction is actually gonna continue.
It's because American, Israeli and Iranian missiles have left much of the region's energy infrastructure and ruins things like refineries, gas terminals that will take years to rebuild, which means years before that oil and gas comes back online this winter is probably gonna bring the first big wave of hardship.
Right now, spring and summer is a time of year when countries are usually stockpiling oil and gas so that they can get their people through the cold months.
But instead, those countries are burning their stockpiles down to zero.
That means December and January are likely to bring a whole new oil shock when a billion people across Europe, Asia, and North America go to turn on their winter stoves or heaters and find that there is not enough gas to go around.
Now look.
I'm not saying all this because I wanna scare you and we are not on the verge of some great collapse.
I promise you that Mad Max is gonna remain a thing that you watch just on your TV and not out your window.
And I'm telling you all this because the architects of this war want you to believe that this the way things are right now, today, that that's the worst of it.
That we just have to write out a few weeks of high gas prices and we're gonna come out the other side of this war basically unscathed.
But what's happening right now is a trick.
This lull is, it's fake.
It's hiding the real consequences of this war, which are coming.
The people in Iran and in neighboring countries who go to sleep under falling bombs are already living under this war.
The thing is, is that, I'm not saying it's the same, but pretty soon we are going to be living the consequences of this war to

over the past 50 years since the peak oil panic, we've made extraordinary advances, for better, for worse.
I mean, fracking technology unlocked the Eagle Ford and the Permian Basin.
Offshore deep water drilling added enormous reserves.
LNG became globally traded and ubiquitous.
So Hubbert's prediction curve was essentially dead.
Oil and gas are fungible commodities that are traded on global exchanges.
So when prices go up anywhere, they go up everywhere.
India now buying Russian crude at a 50% higher volume than February just to compensate for the Gulf disruption.
Those prices are still tracking global benchmarks.
There's no escape valve.
And listen, we see it because it starts at the pump, right?
Gasoline prices are already spiking, and every American with a car or a commute feels it immediately and viscerally.
That part's obvious, but then the cascade begins.
Trucking costs rise because diesel is a fuel input.
Rail shipping, maritime freight, last mile delivery, all of it reprices.
The cost of transporting every good in the economy goes up, which means the cost of every good in the economy goes up next, agriculture.
Fertilizers and petrochemical derivatives and farm equipment that run on diesel.
Food prices were already elevated and now they get a second wind.
Then manufacturing inputs are embedded in almost every industrial production process.
Steel, aluminum, plastics, chemicals, all of them feel the burn and all of that reprices with a lag.
So it shows up first in the PPI, which is what we're looking at now, and then eventually in CPI and by then it's too late.
So this is just one of the things that makes this war insane.
I mean, completely batshit insane, but if we were gonna have one, if he insisted on bringing us into this war, he absolutely needed it to be short, not protracted like it's headed for short, because the damage, once it gets into the economy, it just doesn't go away.
The longer the oil stays at triple digits, the deeper the inflationary wave.
And Trump has catastrophically underestimated the Iranians.
He thought this was gonna be quick, but now they hold all the cards and they know it.
This is an A skirmish, it's an endurance contest, and the American economy, quite frankly, isn't built for this.
So the thing about the PPI data that we just got is that this is before the Iran War.
This is before the Strait of HOR moves closed.
This is before WTI and Brent went past a hundred dollars a barrel.
So by the time we get March's data in mid-April, it's gonna reflect a 40% shock and an increase to energy prices built into the numbers that are already the worst.
And here's why.
Economists fear inflation above every other metric, above unemployment and deficit spending.
Even interest rates.
Inflation is the great leveler.
It levels every playing field.
It doesn't care if you're a developing agricultural economy or the most diversified industrial economy in human history.
Doesn't care if you're Japan, almost entirely import dependent and extraordinarily exposed to commodity price shocks or the United States.
With our trillion dollar consumer market.
Inflation hits everything everywhere, and it causes enormous collateral damage in the form of job losses and a recession eventually.
And it erodes purchasing power.
It punishes savers.
It destroys fixed income budgets for anyone on a pension or a salary.
And every time a central bank tries to tame it aggressively, they break things.
But my biggest concern right now, the Boulder, in my opinion, that's sitting on the edge of the cliff, is private credit.
Now, we've been talking a lot about this because it's starting to percolate into the mainstream now.
Morgan Stanley dropped the note on Monday forecasting that default rates in direct lending could reach 8%.
That's like COVID era high.
Other analysts that look at the business development companies, the BDC space, say that these publicly traded vehicles that lend to small and medium sized businesses are projecting defaults in certain software heavy portfolios as high as 15%.
Now, this BDC sector has already declined by 23%, and you have a ton of business that's coming for maturity.
In 2026, BlackRock, TCP Capital saw its net asset value drop. 50% in one year go capital just cut its dividend by 15%.
So now throw inflation into that picture.
Higher input costs, squeeze the EBITDA of private credit borrowers who are already leveraged to the HILT coverage ratios, which is the measure of how comfortably a company can service its debt.
Wind up compressing, defaults accelerate.
And then you're in two, 2007, 2008 territory where structural parts of the broad economy start quietly collapsing in ways that are invisible to the average person at first until the big domino falls publicly.
And that domino probably looks like one of the big banks announcing a significant pullback from private, private credit lending.
So like one of the large BDCs reporting devastating earnings that trigger a wave of redemptions and a run in both the equity and the bond markets that are attached to that sector.
That kind of contagion can't be contained.
It spreads.
It always spreads through the interconnected tissue of the financial system that no one's fully mapped.
By the way, this is why inflation is the most feared of all metrics.
Not because it raises prices.
It's not a one-to-one relationship.
It's because inflation actually is the pin to pop whatever bubble is out there.
It finds any overinflated over leveraged and overexposed area of the economy and pops it.

Moving on to section D, the moral rot of war profiteering.

Hello Coffee.
My name is Nick.
I'm the CEO of Bubblemaps, which is an on chain analytics company.
So you guys just analyzed a series of Polymarketaccounts, which seemed to be related to each other financially.
And can you just tell us about the kinds of bets you saw them making related to wars?
Their accuracy and just some of the timing things.
Obviously it's very hard to prove definitively who this is without having the internal documents, but just, just tell us some of the red flags you guys saw.
Yeah, for sure.
So to give you some context, recently they've been, somebody got arrested in Israel for insider trading and it wasn't fully market.
And it, in the article, which was not fully disclosed, there was a lot of secrecy around this news.
We learned that somebody that was in the military personnel of Israel was using this privilege information to do insider trading, and he got arrested.
And so this inspired us to look into this in more depth was this an in isolated incident or is there more of this insiders who are benefiting from privileged military like information?
And so we looked into more of this Polymarket, war bets and war markets, and we find, we found that in fact, There was plenty more insiders or potential insiders.
I'm gonna be very careful with the wording, as you said, we're never sure, but more of these very suspected or suspicious trades that were happening on this markets.
And on this particular post that we, that we shared today, it was seven accounts on Polymarket that were, for the most part, betting on US and Israeli military operations with a 93% success rate.
Pretty good, pretty good, pretty good.
Decent.
And, and let's, and let's be clear, these, they weren't betting on events that were already like 90% gonna happen.
Some of their bets were on actually very unlikely events, right?
At the time.
The the, the mainstream aca, the mainstream consensus was that these were unlikely events, like 80% not gonna happen.
They would bet the yes or 80% gonna happen, they would bet the no.
Right?
Isn't that what y'all found?
Yeah, for the most part, for the most part, at least for the trades that made the most money, of course it was mostly trading at like 20 cents.
Meaning that the consensus were was 80% not gonna happen and they traded against it.
So not only the amounts were suspicious in the sense that it was very unlikely events, but also the timing.
So as you said, the timing of this bets occurred, I don't know, maybe one or two weeks before the resolution of the event, which was the strikes from the US and from Israel in Iran.
And we've seen this network of accounts that were betting dating all the way from 2024 to 2026.
So it's been two years of successful trades.
And then the part that is insane is the fact that they're connected on chain.
Without getting into too much specificities, they were sharing MXC deposits, they were sharing by bid deposits, they were wiring profits to the same deposit address.
Sharing funding address was very obvious pattern of clustered Polymarket accounts.
What do you think this means for the future of these prediction markets?
I mean, obviously there's a claim that the, this is not allowed.
Insider trading's not allowed Polymarket's gonna go after them.
Kalshi, they're gonna shut it down.
The one thing that occurs to me is it's actually very hard, even if you know the identity of the person to prove that it's insider trading.
Because for example, yes, if they are like a lieutenant colonel in, in the Americans are armed forces, yes, you can go, okay, that's obvious insider trading.
Right?
But let's say it's the like, like step cousin or something who just got the intel from somebody and they insider traded it.
Are you gonna know, like even if you're a poly market, how can you say for sure that's insider trading?
It seems to be just the fact that these markets are there, is presenting the opportunity for all sorts of insider trading, that no matter how much information you have on chain or even the KYC, it's gonna be very hard to prove.
When we talk about military insiders, most of the time people intuitively point towards like high level government people or like high level general or lieutenant as you said.
But it can be anyone.
It can be troops on the ground, it can be people that are fueling the jets.
It can be logistics, it can be intelligence.
Like there's so many people that are involved when it comes with military operations.
You can even, as you said, potentially can be the dad.
The son is calling him the day before saying, look dad, I'm gonna be away tomorrow.
Stay safe.
Love you.
It can be the wife.
She's aware too.
I mean, technically.
So there's, there are thousands of peoples who are, who are aware ahead of time.
So this makes it very hard to track and to know who are, who are gonna be the insiders.
They can be outside of the us potentially outside of like the US jurisdiction.
And yeah, this is, this is tricky, but like definitely prediction markets are opening a new layer, a new category of, of potential insiders.
Military personnels, big tech, employees policy, Medicare, Central bank employee.
Like all those people, they know information ahead of time and a couple of years ago they couldn't do anything about it or with it.
And now they can make a quick three x anonymous.
It's, it's great a hey future of finance.
No, it's actually reminds me a lot of the Pelosi stuff.
People go, oh, Nancy Pelosi's such a great traitor.
They forget it's Paul Pelosi that's placing those bets, her husband.
Right.
And that's always been the plausible deniability of the whole thing is.
Well, I can't obviously trade.
That is gonna be up to my husband.
My husband's just interested in the market, right?
And that's all, of course, what you can say here too is like, oh, man.
Well, of course, as an armed service member, I wouldn't trade, but my wife got really interested in poly market war betting.

Despite the influence weapons companies have over us, politics and the trail of destruction, they've left around the world.
There's been very little in the way of accountability.
So I'm about to meet a former prosecutor who's trying to change that.
Brad Wolf spent his career as a government's lawyer for the state of Pennsylvania.
Over the past couple of years, he's led the Merchants of Death Walk arounds, tribunal.
What is the Merchants of Death?
So the merchants of Death is a people's tribunal and people's tribunals have a longstanding tradition, such that when the courts refuse to act and hold people or corporations or governments accountable, the citizenry has to act.
This tribunal was meant to hold accountable US weapons manufacturers for knowingly producing products that kill innocent civilians in very large numbers Across the, across the globe.
We interviewed international attorneys.
We interviewed military officers.
We interviewed award-winning journalists.
We interviewed victims.
We interviewed doctors, human rights workers, and put all the information together in video documents in order to present it to the judges, but also to present it to the public because we wanted this to be a a, an educational tool as well.
And what did you conclude?
So after eight months of presenting evidence to our judges, the judges deliberated and they found the four defendants, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and the drone maker, general Atomics.
Our 10 judges found them guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide as defined by the Rome statute of the International criminal court.
The companies, they say, we just make the weapons.
We're not in charge of what happens with the weapons or who's dropping it or who's using it.
How do you respond to that?
Well, they're not just making the weapons.
What they're doing is they are creating a narrative with their dollars, and that narrative is in the halls of Congress.
Through lobbying, they're able to lobby individuals in the Pentagon.
They're able to employ retired officers from the Pentagon, put them on their board of directors for large sums of money, and then have them go on television shows like CNN or M-S-N-B-C or Fox, and tell the American public that it's necessary for military action, which of course means more contract for that legends maker.
Iran is back on their heels.
We have an opportunity to finish these guys once and for all, for their malign and an aggressive behavior and destabilize in the Middle East.
So they create a narrative to sell products that they know are killing innocent people.
There were some people who will say that at the end of the day, this tribunal doesn't have any legal jurisdiction.
We've heard over and over again how powerful military industrial complexes is there a way of holding it accountable within the legal framework that we have.
Yes, there is a way to change this.
The tribunal, the judges, outlined a number of recommendations in their final verdict.
So for instance, if you would have a ban on weapons makers, lobbying members of Congress who are approving contracts for these weapons makers, that would be a step in the right direction if you would prosecute the CEOs of these companies and hold them accountable for war crimes.
That too could have a, have a big impact.

Decades of lavish spending in Washington have created the largest military the world has ever seen with a network of roughly 750 foreign bases and troops stationed in more than 160 countries.
In US foreign policy conflict is a permanent fixture.
Since 1945, the US has bombed or invaded at least 28 countries, causing the deaths of millions of people.
Don't kid yourself.
You do have a military industrial complex they do.
Like war.
President Trump presents himself as the antidote to this status quo.
One of the first meetings I wanna have is with President Xi of China, president Putin of Russia, and I wanna say, let's cut our military budget in half for a moment.
The president's talk of budget cuts had the Big Five on edge.
We are seeing defense stocks pretty much all lower right now.
You got Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman all losing investor money today, but Trump's actions speak louder

within just six months of taking office.
Trump's administration bombed three countries, Yemen, Somalia, and Iran American military capabilities were on display with Operation Midnight Hammer, some 75 missiles launched, including 14 GVU-57, massive ordinance Penetrators, also known as the bunker Buster bombs under the pretext of what the Pentagon calls great power competition.
Trump has proposed a Pentagon budget worth more than what the next 10 military powers spend on their armed forces combined.
Highest budget we've ever had in history for military, $1 trillion.
And we're getting the greatest missiles, the greatest weapons.
And I hate, I hate to do it, but you have to do it because we believe in peace through strength.
The forecast for the US war industry, once again is looking good.
Whatever the wider cost the arms industry has now in infiltrated almost every part of our federal government to the point that civilian control of the military is at times in question.
This great power competition lens is so ambiguous that the strategic end is completely unclear, which is perfect for contractors because that means that there's never gonna be enough to win a great power competition.
No empire has ever maintained its dominant role in the world forever.
We have seen that in history over and over again.
Yet the United States somehow thinks that it is special or different, and that it will be able to maintain global dominance forever.
And now the United States is poised to spend itself into oblivion in an attempt to maintain this global dominance.
And that will come to the detriment of democracy, to the quality of life for Americans and probably to the detriment of peace in the world.

Deadline that President Trump has set 8:00 PM Yep.
Has threatened to destroy a civilization.
How does an investor process that?
Is it, is it a bigger upside risk or downside risk?
This video is such a good illustration of just how cannibalistic today's economic system actually is because, what do you mean?
These are like serious, professional people discussing the best way to approach gambling on the outcome of a potential genocide for personal profit and society treats this practice very seriously, right?
As if it's actually contributing in some kind of meaningful way.
They're not creating value, right?
They're just moving value around.
They're reconceptualizing and recontextualizing what value means in order to siphon some of it into their own pockets in the process.
And they siphon it outta the pockets of the people at the bottom of the mechanical totem pole, whose job it is to make sure that the cogs stay greased and keep turning.
They package the mortgages of poor people into giant balls of conceptual debt and then make bets on whether or not they think poor people as a whole are gonna be able to pay their bills.
And then when the poor people can't pay their bills anymore, when the debt goes sour, they use their pre-purchase.
Pawns within the government to use the poor people's tax money to bail them out of the repercussions.
They use their pawns in government to give them control of the retirement funds of the population, and then use that money as leverage to invest in a way that manipulates geopolitical and local political outcomes that serve their interests and hurt the population.
They weaponize your own retirement money against you.
This cancerous system goes all the way to the very core of how our society operates today.
What is the number one thing that is prioritized in the way that giant corporations operate?
Right?
It's not profitability, it's shareholder value.
It's making sure the bet pays off.
Amazon wasn't profitable for many, many years after it was founded.
They were losing money on purpose in order to drive small businesses into bankruptcy in order to dominate as much of the market as possible in order to profit more later on.
So the company was losing money, but the size of the company was growing dramatically, which, if you're a shareholder, is extremely profitable, which is why this is what's prioritized most in the system.
This is where the rich people keep all their money.
They also just openly straight up fix the bets Mafioso style.
Like the other week, somebody made a $1.5 billion bet that the price of oil was about to come down a little and the general market was about to stabilize.
Literally, minutes after that, Donald Trump posted on truth social that negotiations with Iran were going fantastic, and the Strait of Horus was gonna open any minute now, and that didn't actually happen, but it did temporarily stabilize the market and bring the price of oil down.
Whoever made that bet made hundreds of millions of dollars.
In minutes is not just a Donald Trump problem, right?
It's a global politician problem.
Really.
A member of Congress gets paid $174,000 a year as a salary.
Meanwhile, the average net worth of a member of Congress is $6 million.
The United States Congress consistently outperforms the most successful investors anywhere in the world by a pretty big margin.
They literally profit from things like war and genocide.
It just happened to all start buying shares in defense contractors right before a massive conflict starts just happened.
To know when to sell at just the right time, right before the market takes a hit.
This is not just insider trading, it's not even just market manipulation at this point.
This is what the system is.
This is what it's for.
People have been convinced that this giant, self consuming casino is an actual, feasible, sustainable economic system, and the people that they're voting for to protect their interests are the gangsters who are fixing the bets.
This is madness to, its very core, it's madness.
It's a sick, broken system where the parasites have completely overtaken.
The host,

right before I was about to record this Polymarket's, announced that Palantir will now build the integrity monitoring system to catch insider training happening on the platform.
So the same guy profiting from government intelligence contracts is now also about to fund and monitor a platform where people with government intelligence are allegedly making millions.
Poly market also receives funding from the Intercontinental Exchange.
The company that literally owns the New York Stock Exchange and just recently they put $2 billion in.
So point is they have the biggest names and surveillance in Wall Street all in.
But the thing is, even with all that money, it can only go so far. 'cause when the Pentagon Project can even be shut down, you also need someone to make sure that doesn't happen.
Well, good thing Donald Trump Jr.
Is not only an advisor to both poly market and Kalshi, but his venture capital firm has also invested millions in a poly market.
But the family web goes deeper.
I didn't even know this, but President Trump's own media company has also launched his own prediction platform called Truth.Predict with crypto.com.
So the point is, the Trump family has a vested financial interest for the platform to succeed, but also to politically protect these prediction markets.
It's exactly why when the DOJ under Biden rated poly markets CEO's home and seizes devices for letting Americans bet on the platform to VPNs in 2022, charges were immediately dropped once Trump came into office.
But no amount of protection is guaranteed until you put the right guy in charge of writing the rules.
Trump's Pick to lead the CFTC, which is like the agency that's supposed to regulate these sorts of markets, is a guy named Michael Seelig.
And before he got this job, he was this lawyer who represented crypto client.
And the very first thing he did when he got the position was recruit executives from Poly Market, Kalshi crypto.com.com, DraftKings and FanDuel, to advise his agency on how to write the rules for their own industry.
But I'm laughing because it sounds ridiculous, but soon after he killed the rule that would ban political and sports betting contracts.
And he did this by classifying prediction markets as commodities, not gambling, because commodities have way looser rules.
So now states that were trying to sue poly market and Kalshi for violating gambling laws, can't touch them anymore.
And oh, like by the way, he's doing this all by himself.
All four other commissioner seats that were previously taken are now empty.
So it's just him writing these rules advised by the very companies that he's supposed to regulate.
So that's the funding, the political connections, and the captured regulators.
But remember how I said that I didn't expect where this all led to because if we're really gonna follow the money here, none of it really works without one thing.
And that's you before those who profited from the war were only the insiders.
But now every time you place a bet on war breaking out or someone getting unli, the uncomfortable truth is that makes you a war prophet or two.
And so you can blame the others and the big guides.
But $1 billion has already been bet on this war alone.
And congrats if you win.
You just bet on human suffering.
And even when you lose out on your bet, your money is what?
Lets insiders cash out half a million dollars this same week.
Everyone's gas goes up.
So just like defense contractors may not want it to end the prediction market, business model also doesn't need them to end either.
Because longer the crisis, the more uncertainty and the more uncertainty, the more people trade.
And the more people trade, the more the platform makes.
And you are funding it too.
But the thing is, the real cost of all this goes beyond money.
Because what nobody's talking about is what happens when the people placing the bets are the ones influencing the wars themselves.
And this might be the most dangerous consequence of what's happening right now, because remember that Venezuela story I've been talking about?
Well, there's a part of the story I didn't even tell you when that bet was placed.
The OZ on poly market spiked because people watching this knew this wasn't just some regular Joe.
And what that means is that that spike was visible to anyone on the platform, which means it includes the very people the operation was targeting.
An analysis in the irregular warfare journal calculated that from the moment that BET was placed, Maduro's security detail had precisely 40 minutes to relocate him before the US Special Operations team arrived.
So now really think about that.
What I'm telling you here is that probably the most important asset and warfare, the element of surprise was almost blown by some dude chasing bands on a betting platform.
And that was just one bet on one operation.
But now there's 213 of these active markets on this war.
So what happens if foreign intelligence catches onto that same pattern?
The consequences are different.
That next week may not just end in a compromise Mission, but if we start sending ground troops, that means compromise American lives.
And again, the craziest thing of all this is that the poly market, CEO, knows this and encourages it, allegedly because a poly market, CEO doesn't just go on 60 minutes and call prediction markets the most accurate thing we have as mankind for no reason.
The access is what they're selling.
And it's exactly why C-N-N-C-N-B-C and the Wall Street Journal have all struck deals with prediction markets.
If the thing you and I can agree that new sources know better than anyone that closer the source, like the more valuable information.
And I don't even have to say allegedly because it's, it's happened.
Two people in Israel were charged with security offenses for using classified intelligence to bet on the June, 2025 strikes.
So what I'm telling you is that what he's really selling here is access to people who already know the answer.
And that's what really worries me because what happens when people with the power to decide when the US strikes another country is also invested in a market predicting when the US will strike that country.
No one's been caught doing that yet officially in America.
But the thing is, they don't even have to be that corrupt to make a bunch of money now.
And that incentive that exists wasn't there two years ago.
So I guess we can just thank God that this incentive didn't exist during World War II because it could have been a lot worse.
But now the question becomes how far does this all go and lead to, well, Polymarket has already answered that.
After the US has struck Iran, people started noticing something.
They noticed that Polymarket has been quietly running a market for years now on whether nukes will be detonated by the end of 2026, over 650,000 have already bet on it.
And after the strikes, enough people voted yes, that Oz reached as high as 22%.
So what's clear is that there is really no line because the only reason they pulled it was that enough people started getting pissed.
So what we're clearly seeing here is this new reality of war right in front of our eyes.
When someone in Teran is sheltering from bombs and an American soldier's family is waiting for news, just becomes this other side of someone else's odds.
What's pretty clear is that war now isn't just being fought, it's being influenced, traded and profited from in that system that makes that possible is only getting and going to get bigger.

Continuing with Section E, the damage our military does.

Let's start with that $1.5 trillion budget which doesn't include, let's be clear, funding for the current Iran war that will come in a further supplemental.
So it's a vast amount of money and ultimately leveraged against the US debt.
We are spending our children's money to take the lives of other people's children.
That's what it boils down to.
It's just a vast amount of money, In a way that is reckless by an administration that is corrupt.
When we look at this new weapon sales, these new weapon sales to Israel, 20,000, 1000 pound bombs coming out of, let's be clear as well US stocks a lot of these weapons are not going to be built afresh.
They're gonna be transferred out of, The US stocks and then President Trump will, if he gets it, spend this money from the taxpayer and from our national debt to recuperate or to reup ourselves for that.
It is another burden, Certainly on the American people, but also on the world.
At the end of the day it is not just these bombs.
There are also other weapons we have provided to Israel, including bulldozers that are being used to deri to destroy Palestinian homes in act of collective punishment.
Senator Sanders will be bringing a vote next week to the floor of the Senate against the bombs, against these bulldozers.
And I think it is vital that we see as many democratic senators as possible, Vote to block those weapons and ideally Republicans as well, because this is no one's interest whatsoever.
And Josh, you said that the foreign military financing, or FMF serves almost as a gift card for Israel to spend on weapons.
You talk about the disproportion in military aids, specifically to Israel that the United States has had historically compared to other countries in the world.
So, Israel has always been by far the largest recipient of US military grant assistance in President Trump's budget request.
The provision to Israel of US funding comprises 63% of the global available total.
People keep asking, why do we keep getting pulled back into wars in the Middle East?
What about this rebalance to Asia?
Well, when you're spending the majority of your global funding in Israel and in the region in the Middle East, of course you're gonna keep getting pulled back.
We are not getting pulled back to the Middle East.
We are anchored to it as a function of our own funding to Israel.

I wanna bring, oh, go ahead, Juan.
Yeah, I, I, yeah, I just wanna say last month the State Department approved potential arm sales to three Middle East countries worth more than $23 billion.
Talk about this age to countries like the UAE, Kuwait and Jordan.
So this isn't aid, this is sales, but the Trump administration used an emergency authority.
These cases were already sitting under Congressional review and Congress had questions both about the armed sales to Israel and about the armed sales to the UAE, the UAE, of course, being involved right now, or supporting the genocide that is occurring in Sudan.
The administration, I think very cynically used the current war with Iran to essentially say, okay, we're declaring an emergency.
We're not gonna answer any more questions from Congress about these human rights abuses, about these risks.
And we are just going to move these forward.
So a very cynical, very disturbing use of of the existing authorities.
And before we go to Rob Weissman, I wanted to ask you four astronauts are part of the NASA Artemis two crew became the furthest humans from Earth and all of history officially, as they began their trajectory, which they just finished around the dark side of the moon, Trump's budget plans to cut 23% of NASA's budget, $3.6 billion, cut to the agency science unit, which could cancel 40 programs.
Can you talk about all of these budget cuts across federal agencies and how it's a path for further privatization of the federal government?
Yeah, so first of all, I think we can all think of a few of four other people that we would rather be the furthest they could be from the earth.
So what Trump is doing is essentially creating an opportunity for SpaceX in particular and for other major companies that have close relationships with the White House, To essentially privatize space, to continue to advance through the defense budget, president Trump's, as he sees it, national security role and to militarized space.
But then to cut the civilian side of the funding in order to allow profit seeking companies, the private sector essentially to build up its role there as well.
So it's a lose lose both for science and for humanity.

Someone needs to count the dead.
Of those babies.
And so I think that those are the stories that are gonna change minds.
They're gonna rewire brains.
And so it is of course, important to synthesize the data.
We need to have that, we need to be armed with the facts and be confident with the truth.
And now let it be known because you guys, you guys have known how bad this is.
You probably already knew in your heart this information.
We've all been watching genocide for three years.
Nothing's worse than that.
And in fact, when making the documentary, I was so worried, why would people care about the earth if they don't care about children being blown up?
No one's gonna give a shit about this.
But it's the opposite.
It's the opposite.
I was, I was beaten down into that dystopian kind of pessimism because of just the way that the system berates you and makes you think that everything is just worthless and, and pointless.
But, but once you get out and you're in the community, you're like, no, no, no.
The vast majority of people agree with this.
The vast majority of people get it.
They're empathetic and it, and it's very motivating actually.
And so I think yes, numbers numb and they can be completely overwhelming, but you can't let the system paralyze you.
That's what they want.
They want us to be terrorized.
This is a full fledged assault on our minds, on our bodies on reality.
So if you just reclaim reality, right?
You reclaim your feelings, let yourself feel, because this is fucking crazy.
None of this, none of this is, is normal.
Genocide is not normal.
That's not the status quo.
That's not the world that I wanna live in.
I don't wanna open my phones and see children being murdered every day.
That's not okay.
We can feel, we can have emotions.
We can talk to people, Hey, have you been watching this too?
Hey, it makes you sick.
Let's talk about it.
These are the conversations we need to have.
And the numbers only take you so far.
Darn.
I think we've seen that in the way that people kind of deal and process information.
I don't think we're meant to.
Process the information like we are now.
We're not meant to see every horrible thing that happens in the world within five seconds.
And it's really traumatic and we have to get, and that's why I'm doing this tour in person, to kind of unpack the trauma of what they've done to us together, because it's a lot, it's a lot.

I, I really appreciated the attention in this documentary to the Superfund sites, the sacrifice zones here in America.
And I, as someone who goes around to sacrifice zones, interviewing, working class people who live there, like it's horrifying how massive this problem is and how ignorant most of us are to how poisoned we already are, let alone the fact that the majority, not the majority, but like the largest single polluter source for Superfund sites is the Department of Defense.
Mm-hmm.
That's more than any one corporate polluter.
And I would be remiss if I didn't, Like mention that we're just days away from the three year anniversary of the bomb train derailment by Norfolk Southern and East Palestine.
I'm gonna be there next week.
Right.
I mean, there are towns like East Palestine all over this country.
You mentioned the coal donna that comes outta West Virginia.
Dr.
Nikki Fabrican, are you in the audience right now?
Where does that coal come through?
Yeah, Baltimore, south Baltimore.
It comes through car after uncovered car daily through South Baltimore, 20 minutes that way people are breathing that in for generations.
People over there just 20 minutes from where we're sitting are walking around with oxygen tanks and it's just normal.
We've accepted this unacceptable reality as.
Normal, and we're not learning the lessons like from East Palestinian, Ohio, red Hill, south Baltimore.
But like, I, I really am thankful to you for, for highlighting just, just how serious this problem is, particularly when it comes to the Department of Defense and the government run sites that are poisoning us.
The question that I wanted to throw is one about perspective, and like you said, like so much of this is knowledge that maybe we already had, maybe we had learned at one time and pushed it under the rug because it was too uncomfortable to, to face.
And I'll be honest, my, I have had trouble facing this for many years as an individual who's well aware of what we're facing.
I kind of gave up on the future.
I basically accepted that like, The, the future's no longer a thing to plan for.
Just do as much good as you can while you're here.
Now.
That changed when I became a father.
Mm-hmm.
And I tear up watching the scenes with, with you and your family, your children.
I wanted to ask like how, how you would sort of impress upon folks like the need for that perspective change on what we think we already know and how vital that perspective change is to getting somewhere we haven't been before.
Yeah, it's a, it's a great point.
And yeah, I kind of had a similar trajectory when I had a kid, even though I, I've always maintained revolutionary optimism because I, I kind of have to have like this militant current of hope.
Otherwise I'd be too sad.
But.
But I think my, my sheer love for humanity and nature has always driven and motivated me, and it continues to double down my motivation.
The second that I meet someone who is invigorated or has had their minds changed by my journalism or anything that I've done in the past.
And so it continues to make me more committed.
When I had, I always felt like I had no choice.
Being just an American, we are born into the system.
We're in the imperial core, it's on our shoulders.
But when I had a kid, it was like, okay, now I really, I am all in.
We are, we are completely invested in this, and we have to do everything with every fiber of our being because we have no choice because we have to fight this, right?
Even if we don't win, even if we're standing on the shoulders of giants for generation, even though it's been a centuries long struggle, the arc of justice is very, very wide.
It, it's not gonna happen tomorrow, and it is a huge, seemingly insurmountable fight, but that's not why we do it.
And yeah, you take breaks for mental health.
You have to do what you can.
You give whatever capacity and talents that you can, but we have to fucking do it because I'm not gonna let these parasites rob our future without a fight.
And this is just one tool in the arsenal.
This is just one tool in the arsenal.
And I, I, I would recommend it's a beautiful thing to have this internationalist lens, right?
That that's first and foremost orienting your perspective internationally.
This is an international system.
All of us are impacted by it.
This is a very clarifying thing.
Let the truth liberate you and free you.
Right.
Reclaim the truth first and foremost. 'cause they're gaslighting us every day.
So that's the first thing to kind of build the foundation upon and then realize the agency that you have as individuals.
Of course all of us can do our part, but we have to have that collective unity and agency.
We have to build organizations.
We have to build big tents around pushing back the data centers because the richest people in the world who are controlling our algorithms and curating our reality, they don't want us to see the success stories.
They don't want us to see how people have beat these in their communities.
How 35 data centers last year got canceled across the country.
Divestment campaigns hugely successful across the country.
None of these are known because they don't want us to see that.
They want us to be despondent, paralyzed, terrorized.
So it's about getting out of that, getting out of that and saying, I'm not gonna accept the state of reality that they're pushing on me and beating me down.
I'm not gonna succumb to the darkness.
I'm gonna have militant hope because we have to.
Because if we didn't, then what's left?
We're gonna succumb to the billionaires.
We're gonna succumb to Elon Musk.
No, no.
We're not gonna give up our planet for Jeff Bezos to have another yacht.

We are living in a time where an Islamic Republic, Lego wrapped video dis track isn't even the strangest thing that I've seen that feels like years ago already, IRGC was putting out Lego video rap dis tracks.
And I just like saying that out loud.
I feel like I'm having a stroke, it doesn't make sense.
And those words coming outta my mouth.
And that's not even like.
That's only the start of when my, my, My week has gotten really weird.
And this has been a tremendously weird week.
You have me on. 'cause if your listeners don't know, I am Iranian.
I'm a physician, and I have a podcast, but I'm also Iranian.
I talk about that a lot in the show as well.
And as I'm sure everyone knows at this point, we almost, or we are at war and our president, I woke up on Tuesday to a truth social post from the president of the United States, the country in which I live in basically threatening to annihilate, well, no, not basically exactly threatening to annihilate the Persian civilization, A civilization that is over 2,500 years old.
A country of 90 million plus people has contributed to the sciences, the arts, history, agriculture, medicine, you name it.
Culture and culture.
I gave, I gave you guys me.
So I mean I mean, be grateful.
And, and and it's just so hard.
And, and it was, it really, it messed me up really bad.
I have to, I'm not gonna lie.
I'm sure it did.
We should ground this a little bit and, and talk about it.
And it's not the, the most super fun, but it, it is like in today's media ecosystem, things move so fast and we're already kind of moving on to all the other insane stuff that's happening.
But I, I gotta tell you, Tuesday, I, I literally at, at Tuesday night, I had a crick in my neck here because my whole day I was just like, over my phone.
I'm like, how am I supposed to work?
This is, this is insane.
Like, I is, is this really gonna happen?
I didn't really think he was gonna drop nuclear bombs, but you have to take the president seriously when they say that.
And even if he didn't mean a nuclear attack did this mean like a lot more bombing, a lot more injury, a lot more civilian death?
So yeah, it was.
It was bad.
This has been a bad week, and the specific was destroy every bridge where people were standing with the, the Iranian flag and every power plant to put the entire country into darkness.
The stone ages as, The secretary of.
War defense.
I can't, I just don't war the heck Seth said.
And how they, it's how they talk.
It's, it's still just like so disgusting and for him to say he's going to genocide an entire people I don't like, even if, oh, it's a negotiating tactic, I don't care.
You can't be saying that kind of thing.
No, it's, yeah.
Even if our food wasn't the best food in the world, you shouldn't want the Iranian people to be annihilated.
And this whole art of the deal thing that people are, this is the, his, the art of the deal this is, it's absurd.
It is demeaning to the office.
It is insulting.
It makes us look terrible on the world stage.
It hurts us in terms of soft power everywhere.
It hurts the United States directly.
There's this whole what I would like to see, I don't know if you played basketball when you guys were younger, but do you remember how like every time, like you would like do a fade away, you'd be like Jordan, or you, or now kids would be like, Curry, Kobe, three point Kobe.
Yeah.
Kobe, whatever.
Yeah.
I've always been, I can't bring that.
Can't.
Yeah.
Totally kidding.
And I, I would like, every time you just throw up a brick, the thing to be like, someone just yells out art of the deal Brick.
Yeah.
Or like every time you stub your toe Art of the deal.
Art of the deal.
I would like that.
To me, it's so crazy that people actually think that this three dimensional chess myth is, is a real thing.
It's just, it's so funny to me.
Still.
I have to laugh about it.
Even if even if Trump had never done or said any of the things he's said and done over the last 10 years, writing quote, A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again is disqualifying.
Absolutely.
Even if you, even if you never intended to do it, and I'm not a hundred percent convinced of that.
I'm not.
Right.
I think I, but.
No.
He needs to be impeached and removed from office.
He should not be the president right now.
And just bring it back to what, I think we talked about this last week, earlier this week.
I don't know, I'm so fucking sick of it.
Reality TV show president that just has the entire world sitting all day waiting to see what mm-hmm.
He's actually gonna do.
This is madness.
Like it's some, yeah.
Like it's a reality TV show where people's lives are like, we're murdering people, are civilizations.
Entire, entire civilizations.
But even without that, let's be real Lebanon, we're gonna talk about this more is under bombardment.
It's a massacre.
Gaza a massacre, Iran a massacre.
So many people have died already.

And finally, section F, making China great again.

Have they clearly defined our reason for being there?
No.
No.
I mean, now we have a very clear reason, which is to reopen the straight of war, which wouldn't have been closed if we hadn't gone to war in the first place.
In that sense, yes, we had, we created a clear war aim by starting a war.
I think the important thing is to go back to the first day of this war and to realize, regardless of how many times Trump denies it, this was a regime change war.
Hmm.
It was meant to be a regime change war.
We're seeing that now.
There was this piece from the New York Times that was very detailed and was kind of a minute by minute explanation of how the administration went to war.
It was clear Trump said, we're gonna hit them really hard, and then the regime's gonna fall.
And to their credit, and boy, how, how rarely do I say this about people in Trump's orbit, but to their credit, people like the CIA director said, I believe the word he used to describe that scenario was farcical.
But Trump didn't want to hear it because remember, Trump wish casts, I mean, I say this every time we talk about him, he tries to manifest things into being.
He's like, yeah, yeah, I know it's a problem, but if we just do it, it will happen.
If you build it, they will come kind of thinking.
And he launched the war, expected the regime to fall, and it didn't.
And when that didn't happen, everything went to hell.
He didn't, they didn't know what to do next.
So he just said, general, have you got more operations?
Yeah, we can there's, we can hit plenty.
There's, Iran is a target rich environment.
We can bump stuff all day long.
But as I as I used to teach at the Naval War College years ago, operational successes without strategic direction don't get you toward victory.
What does the military do when they don't have that strategic direction?
And when they're pulling all of these different threads, right?
This if this is a regime change, like you're, you're going to do a specific thing for regime change as opposed to I'm doing a specific thing for liberation of people, as opposed to I'm doing specific things to open up a street that wouldn't have been closed otherwise.
So how do they plan when there is no strategic direction?
That's not their job.
Their job is plan operations.
The very senior military leaders are supposed to ask that question.
Now, what is it?
We have these packages, we have these target sets, we have these objectives we can achieve.
What is it you want us to do, Mr.
President, where are we supposed to be going with this?
And in the absence of that, they do operations.
They say, okay, well we can destroy some more factories.
We can blow up some more airfields.
We can take out some more boats.
We can do that all day.
At least until we start running out of ammo.
So in the end, it's the people that are supposed to know that are the kind of people that Pete Hegseth has been firing left and right.
Look, we, this is one of the most war game scenarios in American modern American history.
We have been war gaming scenarios about fighting with Iran for almost 50 years.
Mm-hmm.
They've got tons of operational plans sitting on the shelves about everything.
But if the president just kind of wanders into the candy store and says, gimme one of those, gimme one of those and give me one of those, the military salutes smartly and says, yes sir.
Can, can I jump in, Adam? 'cause I Tom made so many great points and I wanna just build on a couple of them.
Yeah, absolutely.
The firings, we've had a lot of generals and animals fired, including the head of the Army during this conflict.
Now, usually when a general admirals file during wars for the conduct of the war, that didn't appear to be the case in this instance.
This was personal animosity.
A secretary who was micromanaging personnel decisions in the Army, looking to put his own stamp on that service.
And while this was largely a war from the air and sea, the Army had an important role.
The air defenses that you heard about the Patriots and the THAAD, those are army operated system restocking.
The munitions that were used for them, it falls on the Army chief of staff.
And he was fired during this conflict.
And so I think that's important to note, just the pace at which these, these personal changes were happening.
The other thing I wanna point out is.
For all the reasons that the United States gave for conducting this war.
Iran was very consistent throughout.
They wanted to survive as a regime.
They wanted compensation for the damages to their country.
And so I think to Tom's point, when one side doesn't have clear strategic aims and the other does, no amount of firepower can resolve that.
And what you saw the Iranians do is take that strategy and marry it with an asymmetric warfare approach to take away the advantage that the United States had with much stronger munitions training, planes, weapons, ships.
And so that's where the strategy, I think, sort of, or lack thereof, Played out on the battlefield.
Two quick points, the, the other thing about Nancy's point about the army, the army took casualties.
Hmm.
We spent a lot of time on watching television with the Air War.
But when some of those bases got hit, those were army people that we lost.
The other is, this looks a lot like Ukraine.
Hmm.
It was exactly the same imbalance of interests.
Putin went in, thought he was gonna just knock the Ukrainian regime over in a day, or three days, or four days.
But also when that didn't happen, Putin didn't have a clear set of goals.
It was just throw more guys and more bodies and blow up more buildings.
And just like the Iranians, the Ukrainians had a strategic goal, survive and control the territory and the government of Ukraine.
And they did.
They have,

the US China relationship is the most important bilateral relationship in the world.
And it will help define the century.
It's in the hands of two very different leaders.
It's hard to imagine two people with more different approaches to leadership.
President Trump is brash.
He's impulsive.
You don't have the cards right now.
Xi Jinping is guarded, methodical, someone who plays the long game, not the Twitter game.
Chinese policy makers see Trump as someone who's transactional and pragmatic who likes to make deals.
They also realize that Trump is very unpredictable.
President Trump makes a lot of threats.
What the markets have realized is that he doesn't execute all of those threats.
A lot of them are just quietly forgotten, and the internet, as usual, has found a name for it.
Taco Taco, taco Taco.
As you would call it, Trump, always chickens out.
The term is actually pretty popular on Chinese social media too.

On Chinese social media.
People love Donald Trump.
He actually has many nicknames.
Another really popular nickname for Trump is transient, which actually means Trump the nation builder.

It's not praising Trump as a nation builder for the United States.
It's more like a Trump helping China to become a superpower.

We're seeing she's basically just sitting back to enjoy the benefits as a flurry of Western leaders coming to Beijing, Mark Carney meets Xi Jinping in Beijing.
It's vital that we build a more sophisticated relationship.
They know that China, like all nation states, will act in its own self-interest.
What they are seeking and signaling is a hedge against the United States, which they now view as an unreliable partner.

And China has learned this the hard way.
China was really caught off guard by Trump's first trade war because it was launched just months after his first visit to China where he received a lavish welcome.

So since then, it has been preparing itself.
In China, there's a famous saying, learning is like sailing upstream pause, and you're pushed back.
And this mindset now shapes Beijing's strategy.
In the second trade war, president Trump tried to deal a knockout blow to China.
What the US wasn't expecting was that China would hit back China retaliated on the US with tariffs of 125%.
China has learned how to play this game, and president Trump knows that this latest headline coming in from the Supreme Court, global tariffs struck down.
China says it is assessing President Trump's second tariff investigation.
This week, as the US continues its effort to rebuild the key trade policy, the rollercoaster has had an impact.
Last year, China's exports to the US fell about 20%.
But if you look at India, they jumped 12.8% to southeast Asian countries.
They rose 13.5% and to the eu up 8.4%.
But trade flows are just one arm of China's strategy.
Explicit export controls on rare earth magnets, rare earth materials is the Trump card.

China imposed export controls on seven types of rare earth minerals and magnets made of them.
These export controls are really inflicting pain on the US manufacturing base because these rare earth magnets are used in everything from iPhones and EVs to big ticket weapons like fighter jets and missiles.
The pain goes beyond us.
Manufacturers since producers around the world are impacted by these controls, and although these measures could backfire as countries explore ways to lessen their reliance on China, those efforts will take time.
China dominates the supply chain mining over 60% of the world's rare earth's and refining.
Over 90% of them rare earth by themselves are not big deals.
The entire category, the market cap was not even 10 billion US dollars.
As a result.
Other countries, they have pretty much given up on rare earth production and refinery process.
China had its own advantages.
Its labor cost is really low, and its environmental standards are pretty lax.
The rare earth industry has been considered strategic for decades.
China has the world's most complete industrial catalogs, but despite the trade wins against Trump, China has issues.
Its industrial success.
Can't fix.
Beijing said a GDP growth target of 4.5 to 5% for the year.
That's the lowest since 1991.
China's economy has a lot of really serious problems.
Local governments, businesses, real estate developers, they borrowed too much and they used those borrowed funds to build too much capacity.
Bridges to nowhere.
Steel mills producing more steel than anyone could ever need, ghost towns of empty property.
As a result of that over capacity, China now has a deflation problem.
For years, China's economic rise has been fueled by its booming exports and investment.
But last year we saw China's fixed exit investment declined for the first time on record.
So it's really just the exports that keep the economy going.

Chinese workers are seeing their pay cuts or even getting fired and struggling to find jobs.
Some of them choose to go into the gig economy, which doesn't really provide a sense of job security.
What a lot of the country realized was that China was actually exporting its deflation overseas.
Whatever they couldn't dump to the United States, they were dumping to Southeast Asia, Latin America, or Europe.
That complicates the relationships.
China is forging even as more countries engage China to hedge against an unreliable us.
China has been keen to assert its economic strength for political influence, but is not willing to get entangle in military conflicts far from home seizure of Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro.
Iran continues to attack its Gulf neighbors.
China certainly has never committed to put troops on the ground to defend Venezuela or Iran.
There's a lesson there, which other friends of China are gonna take away from that.
For Iran and Venezuela, China is their most important economic lifeline.
But for China, these two countries are ultimately not that important.
Iran accounts for about 13 to 40% of China's oil imports, and Venezuela only accounts for 4%.
So this is not a small number, but it is replaceable for China.
But the bigger problem here is Strait of Hormuz.
If Iran continues to close down the Strait, then China will have a problem sourcing nearly half of oil imports.
The Strait of Hormuz is a vital lifeline for 20% of the world's gas and oil flows.
The reduction in traffic increases the threat of an inflation crisis and global recession.
If this war drags on and spread to other countries, then China's economic interest can be threatened.

So for now, China seems focused on only fighting the trade war, an arena where it holds more advantages.
The United States is the world's biggest economy.
It has the world's most powerful military.
Is China quite the equal of the United States?
I think the answer on that, at least for now, is still no, for nations caught in the middle.
There's really only one way forward.
Hedging will be the key word for 2026 or 2027 when two superpowers are having this historical fight.
They want you to take sides, but no one wants to.

We really are, for some reason, actually trying to stop China from executing.
Its probably potentially at least most dangerous base road initiative to our interest.
Now that assumes that it is, it is inimical to our interest.
I think we have made that assumption.
That road would come up through Iran and trace Alexander the greats route all the way up through the, what would be the 1,875 or so miles of shoreline on the Persian Gulf on the eastern side and all the way up to the caucuses.
It would link China's Pacific ports just as the other three base road initiative railroads do through Russia and the caucuses with Europe in a way that would reduce its shipping time from something like a day and a half to two days, depending on which way you go to about 16 hours.
Trains have already applied these railroads, including the one going through the southern part of Iran.
If that happens, then all maritime nations leading of which is the United States, of course the protector of the seas will no longer have seas.
Really worth protecting in the sense of commerce because commerce will be basically landlord.
At least 60% of it will come out of Asia and go to Europe and elsewhere on the land.
You'll have to get on some kind of boat to get to South America, I guess.
But nonetheless, this is a monumental change and it's one more fighting tooth and nail.
Whether Donald Trump knows any of this or Pete Hegseth knows any of this, I have no idea.
But that is, I think behind a lot of what we're doing.
It's also behind Ukraine because Ukraine stopped the very central railroad, which was already making 16 hour trips into the heart of Europe, going all the way to Bremerhaven and Le Havre and other places like that, critical to European trade if it were not a dumb braided as it were by the war going on in Ukraine.
So, and and think about that for a moment as to why Joe Biden and others blinking and Sullivan might have had some reason for doing Ukraine, as it were, rather than what they've been telling us or what they did tell us.
This is all about China and it's all about stopping China, which is to say, I'm not sure that any of this administration that is functioning in front of us every day knows anything about this other than that their masters have told 'em to do this.
And we can talk about who their masters are back in the shadows.
But I think that's ultimately what we're looking at.
So it's much more consequential in this struggle between the rising power and the declining power, and there's no question about that Now then people think or no.
And so it has these ramifications that make things that look tactically and even operationally stupid at the moment, and yet are tied to this much bigger tapestry of geopolitical and geostrategic reality.
Declining power, rising power.
Where's Russia gonna go in all this?
Russia has a choice.
She's both maritime power and land power.
Pri principally.
The latter is Mackinder made clear.
But she does have a formidable maritime capability now growing every moment by her Arctic coastline and the receding ice in the Arctic.
So she's got a choice to make, and she hadn't made it yet.
It, it looks like she's going with China, but, hmm, there's this relationship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, which is kind of strange really, if you think about it.
Unless you understand what Putin wants, which is a better relationship with Washington and maybe even a helping hand, not to Europe, not to nato, not to the transatlantic link.
He's destroyed those or is destroying them, but to Washington because he sees there's something left there worth being friendly with.
So we gotta work all of that into what we're talking about right now, and what we're talking about right now is throwing a sledgehammer into that.
That is awesome because what Iran is doing is upsetting everybody's plans.
To the tune of Mohammed bin Salman being so incredibly insulted by Donald Trump in Southern Florida recently, that now he's thrown his lot in with Zelensky and has changed his routing of his pipelines and other things to avoid Israel and to go through Syria instead.
I mean, these are monumental changes that this hugely, hugely wealthy sovereign wealth fund is making almost overnight because of the insults that Trump hurled at MBS.
And then you've got Iran and what Iran can do to this whole business.
I've just talking, I've been talking about in Southwest Asia, which is if it executes its second tier of targets, the first tier, back up a little bit.
The first tier was so devastatingly done and so indicative of fine intelligence that it was unbelievable to many of the regional powers.
They hit Bahrain and destroyed the Fifth Fleet headquarters and destroyed the largest oil refinery in the Gulf.
Been there for years and put the Barran, Bahrain royal family in fleet flying away.
They hit Erbil where they had hit a number of times before in Kurdistan, Northern Iraq.
They had hit, hit it before with minor missiles just to let the Israelis and the CIA and MI six know that we, that Iran knew they were there.
They hit it this time and just blew it out.
They hit our embassy and Baghdad.
We were operating on only emergency personnel there now.
And oh, by the way, in Bahrain we sent 2000 people back with a suitcase, a kit bag to Norfolk that have now landed in Norfolk.
That's how Marco Rubio did his in neo business, so incompetently and now the citizens of Norfolk and Chesapeake and other areas, Hampton Roads are having to, Support these people who've come back with nothing, no shirt on their back other than the shirt on their back and nothing.
Just the kit bag.
That's what they were told, and they were gone because Bahrain was struck so fiercely.
Well, all to say they have a second tier of targets or maybe a third.
But the second tier is much more devastating.
The first tier of targets was essentially, as they said, we're not gonna hit you if we don't have to.
Prince Sultan Air Base.
We're not gonna hit Saudi Arabia.
We're gonna hit the US Al-Udeid, we're gonna hit the us.
We're not gonna hit you.
Qatar.
They had some incidental damage.
They even apologized for a lot of it this time.
That's not a criterion.
This time they're gonna hit it to devastate it, to devastate the region, to devastate Saudi Arabia, to devastate the Emirates.
All the other countries maybe will, mine will be spared.
I suspect it will.
But this would be a devastating blow to the global economy because we're talking about places like Ras Tanura and Saudi Arabia, where it's 650,000 barrels a day.
Or like Abqaiq, where it's 7% of the world's best supply of best oil. 7%.
This is a huge blow.
And we've already talked about things like urea and helium and other things.
Taiwan maybe got about 15 days left.
And Taiwan is not included in yes, China, you can go through the strait.
Taiwan cannot go through the strait.
So this could be depression producing on the globe if they hit these other targets and they shut down.
And at the same time, the Houthis renew their vigorous pursuit of closing the Red Sea to most traffic that is not supportive of taking out the Israelis, if you will.
Then we've got two of the most important waterways in the world.
Red Sea even.
And the Bab el-Mandeb even more important than the straight of Horus, than the Persian Gulf taken out a commission.
We could have a global, Not just recession.
We're close to recession right now, two quarters in a row.
We could have a global depression that would impact a lot of the world.
Even ultimately Russia, which looks like it's sitting in the catbird seat right now, but might not be if all of a sudden things turn sour for them in this global economy that is not gonna be operating anymore.
All to say this is a much, much more serious struggle than anyone in the Prima Fascia team leading this country.
America seems to understand.

That's going to be it for today.
As always, keep the comments coming in.
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