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Iran finally closed the Strait of Hormuz to watch global oil prices climb, but not enough to destroy demand. Now that the spigot has been closed, Iran can’t close it more.

Iran's talk of a Hormuz deal is a loud declaration that it is going to the mattresses.

This isn’t a peace, but setting a pot on simmer. It’s also better than the alternative.

America can keep this asymmetrical wheel spinning much longer than Tehran can. Practically, maybe not.

From the Department of Unintended Consequences The possible endgames in Iran are starting to look like a Waffle House menu at 3am: Everything will probably give you heartburn, but booze and hunger make people optimistic. The administration is now using phrases like “degrade capability,” “strategic reset,” and “regional stabilization” for the same reason that CEOs do – use enough syllables and it’s less obvious that you’re pin-wheeling. The assumption is that if sufficient pre

Tehran has discovered a deep vulnerability at the heart of the global order.

White House luxuriate in unpredictable chaos. Exactly what China’s current entrenched model needs to avoid.

Four weeks into the current war, the regime’s only hope to increase leverage on Washington is to isolate it politically and win the optics war. Which, given the unprovoked nature of the attack and the fact that all our allies hate us, shouldn’t have been too hard. Save for a glaring miscalculation.

On March 8, around the time that the Swedish navy was impounding its first Russian “shadow fleet” carrier, Britain was considering sending an aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf. President Trump responded “That’s OK Prime Minister Starmer, we don’t need them any longer. We don’t need people that join Wars after they’ve already Won!” Creative grammar aside, days later the White House was calling on Britain, along with France, Japan and South Korean – and China - to help the U

A Weekend Thought Experiment I was mooning around a hospital in the sunny Shi’a south of Iraq when a young doctor flagged me down and politely asked why were we - meaning Americans – there. He’d watched us invade his country twice before toppling the government and dismantling all the systems that ran the country. As far as he could tell, he gently explained, there had been no plan for after we’d blown the place up. The poor guy wasn’t even mad, he was just baffled on a cosm

This will not be a surgical operation from the A Night in Caracas playbook. From the build up, the US the option for a weeks long siege, should it come to that.

On the gulf’s east bank sits Iran, baring its teeth at Saudi Arabia and doing a fair job of conquest-by-internal-rot of Iraq.