Why Nobody Came to Help the U.S. in Iran

Toy Tank Atop Iranian Currency and Flag | Licensed by Envato Elements: https://app.envato.com/search/photos/3abc94ac-73db-4912-ae0d-3e507dd11191?itemType=photos&term=iran+war

Despite the large rolodex of U.S. allies, nobody has pulled up to the Persian Gulf to support the U.S. There are several reasons for this, though.

Part of the post-WWII deal was that the U.S. would provide global maritime protection, so nobody else had to; as a result, few powers could help out, even if they wanted to (like Japan, the UK, and France). It doesn’t help that the U.S. launched this operation without consulting anybody, but even if they had, most allies wouldn’t touch a Persian Gulf conflict with a ten-foot pole.

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Transcript

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. Today we’re taking a question from the Patreon crowd, specifically considering how dependent countries like to Pan and the countries of Europe are upon energy imports, specifically from the Persian Gulf. How come they haven’t been helping out with the conflict? Well, let’s look at it. First of all, not a lot of countries maintain naval forces that are capable of rapid projection. 

You basically have them on a degree of standby until something big happens and then everything has to be spun up. So, for example, unless you’re the United States very special case, everybody’s navies are pretty much limited to coastal patrol. So if you do have a long range ship, it’s probably just sitting in dock until it’s needed. And then it’s going to take a few weeks to a few months to get it ready to go. 

That’s one. Number two. The deal that we struck with everybody at the end of World War two was that we will patrol the global oceans and keep the ceilings open for everyone. If in exchange, you allow us to control your security policies. And part of us controlling your security policies is we don’t want you to have any long range power projection, because if you have a long range power projection, you’re going to use your long range power projection. 

You might use it in ways that we don’t want. So with the exception of Japan, which is an island nation and has the second largest navy in the world, and the United Kingdom, which has a bit of an imperial hangover, the only other country in the world that maintains really any long range capability that’s independent is France, and that specifically. 

So it has an independent capacity. So really we’re talking here about three countries. No one else could have even helped if they had wanted to. Which brings us to number three a burden sharing intelligence, sharing whatever you want to call it on February 11th. Netanyahu, Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, came to the white House, made a pitch to Trump for the United States and Israel to jointly attack Iran. 

He said the war would be over in four days. We can kill the leadership because you know where they are. There will be a revolution. They’ll probably rename the capital to Trump Obelisk, and you will go down as the bravest and most capable American president in history, and you will do something that all the cowards before you refused to do. 

And Trump looked around the room and everyone who knew something about foreign policy, for example, Secretary of State Rubio and the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dean Cain said, Mr. President, this is an horrible idea. We’ve been hearing some version of this for 30 years, specifically from Netanyahu, who has tried to convince multiple American presidents to fight his war. 

For him, the math never checks out. The Strait of Hormuz will be wrecked. But, Mr. President, it’s your call. And then the people who knew nothing about foreign policy, notably Pete Hegseth at defense, said, do it. 

The carrier sailed later that day. So normally when the United States goes to war, we compare intelligence with our allies. That never happened this time. And we now know, even from within the white House four months later, that there wasn’t any intelligence. This was just a pitch deck from Netanyahu, who has been chomping at the bit to get the United States to fight his war for a long time. 

So normally we’d like consult with NATO, especially with the Japanese and the Brits, and we’d arrange for a coalition to put at least a veneer of internationalism on top of whatever it was that we felt we needed to do. None of that happened. So the war began a couple of weeks later. Just just the amount of time that it took to sail to get there. 

And then about in week four of the war, when the Trump administration realized it wasn’t going well, which was difficult because DoD was only showing him like strike footage, because any time they tried to give him an accurate assessment of how this was not going well, he’d kick him out of the room. Well, by four weeks on, it was starting to come at him from all angles that it wasn’t going well. 

And that is when he started yelling at the allies to send forces. But as I’ve mentioned, no one else has forces to send, and the few that might certainly in a hot situation are not going to be sending things through Suez. So even if like, say, the French and the Brits had snapped to at that instant, unlikely they would have needed a month or two to get their forces ready to deploy, and it would have been over another month before they would have actually arrived. 

And in the meantime, you know, Iran went the way Iran did. And we’re now in a situation where we get final point is that nobody outside of Trump and Netanyahu wanted this war in the first place. We now know unequivocally that Iran’s drones are more than capable of taking out every piece of physical infrastructure throughout the Persian Gulf, which can trigger a global energy induced depression. 

We now know that their monitoring of the entirety of the Strait of Hormuz is strong enough that they can even take occasional shots at ships that are hugging Omani waters on the southern side of the strait. And really, even with the US Navy concentrated on the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, there’s not a lot it can do, because if those ships stay still, then they become targets to. 

So we’re in this never ending negotiation where negotiations aren’t actually happening. Because this is just horrible. Normally when you’re having a real negotiation, you have your headliners who do the real talks and what are called technical folks do the technical talks so that when the headliners show up, there are only real things to discuss. 

Well, Trump has shut the Department of State to the side and refuses to deal with that at all. Even that’s where most of the policy experts are. 

He made Secretary of State Rubio be in charge of all that because he doesn’t like Rubio either. So all you Rubio fans who think that he might be the successor to MAGA, think again. He also doesn’t like the National Security Council. That does kind of have all the deep thinking as opposed to the diplomacy. 

Not so it could be more efficient in the way that Kissinger did it, but to shove it all to the side. So there were no negotiations with the allies on the front end, and there’s no technical talks happening with the Iranians on the back end. So the last time that Trump’s preferred negotiators, Jared Kushner and Steve Whitcomb, went to Doha this past week, they got to Doha and the Iranians like, yeah, not this week. 

We have technical talks to do. And so there’s still nothing happening. There have been no technical talks since this whole thing started in February. Anyway. If you’re an ally and you’re looking at this, you’re like, why would I develop a military capability that the United States has until now, said I should not have in order to use it to prosecute a war that hurts my economy. 

And then we are at the mercy of a diplomatic situation that doesn’t have diplomats. So, yeah, no, the allies haven’t done anything here that is untoward. We’re just in a bit of a trap caused by a man who refuses to surround himself with anyone but sycophants and is very, very easy to manipulate so long as you’re willing to lie to him, which is not what a good ally does. 

All right, that’s it for me. Until next time.

The End of NATO

Flag of NATO

The Trump administration has said that it is now policy to not send meaningful reinforcements to Europe in case of a military conflict. Most notably, super carriers, carrier aviation, extra fighter jets, aerial refueling, airlift capacity, air defense, and precision munitions. 

It guarantees a divergence in training, doctrine, and the ability of the various countries of the alliance to function as a unit. For all intents and purposes, NATO is now gone.

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Transcript

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. Today we’re talking about NATO, specifically. The US Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, just changed the mechanics of what the United States might send to might send to NATO in case of a military emergency. You know, a war and the short version is very, very little. No carriers, no carrier aircraft, no precision munitions, no logistical supply, limited satellite support.

In essence, Hegseth says that the United States wants to operate as if a war with China would happen at any time and any assets that we might need to fight. China can never be deployed anywhere else. That’s the official statement. The unofficial statement is after the Iran war, the United States has lost the capability to even pretend to fight more than one war at a time, and the one war that it would fight.

If you’ve chosen to preposition everything for China and China only means that you really can’t intervene anywhere else. We had talked earlier about how the way the Trump administration fought the Iran war would basically excise its power from the Eastern hemisphere. We are seeing that in real time now. And politically, the Trump administration has made the decision that Europe is on its own.

So where does this take us? Well, number one, it means that the US alliance, the NATO alliance might still exist on paper. But if the United States is already saying before conflict even begins it, very little and certainly none of the assets that the Europeans don’t have are coming. That’s that’s pretty much the end of things. The plan for NATO going back to 1949 has been that the United States will develop certain broad area competencies, and then the Europeans won’t.

And we did that in order to make sure that the Europeans were always dependent upon us. And in the case of a fight, we would command all of their militaries. That has now ended. So the United States just lost force projection in Europe. And as the Europeans now retool to do what they can, we’re going to lose interoperability.

You see, the issue is that the United States weapons systems are designed for very, very long range and then durability upon arrival. But that’s not the sort of fight that the Europeans would ever find themselves in. So the Europeans have purchased American weapon systems in order to maintain interoperability with the country that will ultimately be commanding their troops in a hot fight.

If those forces if the American forces are not coming, there’s no point in maintaining interoperability. And if you play that forward into a world where drones are up and rising, the Europeans don’t have the 1015 years it would be necessary to build an American style force with American style weapons that can’t be built that fast. So they’re going to be doing Ukrainian style weapons that can be built in weeks to months, probably backstopped by a multi-state nuclear deterrent.

How that is managed? TBD, which means that in as little as a year from now, the European and the American militaries are not going to be interoperable anymore. And if they do decide, for whatever reason, to operate side by side, they’ll be doing so with different command structures and different doctrine, which means that now, in addition to the political decision in Washington to end the alliance, the Europeans are going to be forced to make procurement decisions that would functionally end the alliance anyway.

So NATO had a great run. We are now entering the great unknown of strategic breakdown and realignment, and the Trump administration has made sure that Europe and the United States are in opposite sides of that.

We Have a Peace Deal! Sort of…

Flags of the United States and Iran blending. Licensed by Envato Elements

It looks like we finally have a peace deal between Iran and the U.S. (and maybe Israel). Neither side can agree on the terms, so it’s really more of a tentative agreement to stop shooting at each other…at least for now.

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Transcript

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from the San Luis Valley in southern Colorado. I’m on my way to New Mexico, and I just heard on the radio that we have a peace deal between the United States and Iran. So I went till I get a blip of data and. Yeah, no we don’t. Okay, let me outline the five big things that supposedly there’s agreement not agreement on. 

Number one, the Strait of Hormuz itself, the idea both sides say that it’s going to be open. The Americans say there’s going to be no charge whatsoever for anyone passing through. Iran is confirmed that there will not be tolls. There will be a service fee that is higher than the tolls they’ve been charging. So air. Number two, Israel’s included, according to the Iranians, and not included according to the United States. 

In fact, in the time it took me to get my blip, the Israelis have carried out several strikes throughout the country. 

number three, the nuclear program. The United States has said that the Iranians will close the entire thing down, and that all the enriched uranium in the country will be removed and spun down to what you would use for power, fuel. 

The Iranians have said no, not even remotely. It’s never leaving the country. We might spin it down to 30% enrichment. By the way, you need 95% for a bomb and only 3.5% for nuclear power. But that’s it, then. Sanctions. Iran says that they’re all lifted immediately in the United States. This says they’ll be lifted in stages, with the first phase being lifted maybe in 60 days, assuming the Iranians behave. 

And then, number five, restitution. The Iranians say that the Americans have agreed to $300 billion of investment to compensate for launching the war. The Americans made no mention of that. The Iranians also said that $25 billion of frozen assets will be freed immediately. And the United States has said, you know, in bits and pieces over the next decade, maybe. 

Why so far apart? I mean, actually, these positions are further apart than we were back in February, the day before the war started. The key thing to remember about all of this is number one. The Iranians are always bastards when it comes to negotiating. Everyone has been trying to hold talks with them in some form for over 40 years. 

And so the idea that this time it was going to be quick, please. Second, there’s not a single American involved in these talks. It’s not just that we have a Pakistani field marshal doing the negotiating. It’s being moderated by Qatar and Saudis. However, the United States does not have an ambassador in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia or gutter or Kuwait for that matter. 

So everything is happening like a game of telephone, three steps removed from any American. And then the State Department isn’t involved because there are no ambassadors. So it’s not a surprise to me that this isn’t going anywhere. What’s the surprise to me is that anyone else thinks it might be going somewhere. Markets, of course, have exploded and all is down, but there’s no reason to think that this is going to be any different. 

If you just need something to underline that, the documents will be signed in Switzerland on Friday remotely, the Americans and the Iranians can’t be bothered to show up. So no, this is not the end. All they’ve agreed is they would prefer to stop shooting at one another. We’ll see how long that lasts.

DHS Gets Funding… A Lot of Funding

DHS building in Washington DC | Photo by Wikimedia COmmons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Homeland_Security#/media/File:DHS_St_Elizabeth's_Building_1.jpg

ICE and DHS just got approved for a new funding package that expands resources for immigration enforcement and border security. My primary concern is the economic impact of this new funding, rather than the politics of it all.

The U.S. workforce is already under immense demographic pressure, and introducing stricter immigration policies will only worsen labor shortages (especially in sectors that are heavily reliant on immigrant workers). This means higher costs, reduced service levels, and baked-in inflation for the remainder of the decade.

The political side is concerning as well, but Trump’s attempts to limit congressional leverage are nothing new. Just another signal that U.S. power dynamics and party structures are in flux, as more decision-making power is falling into the hands of the executive branch.

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Transcript

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. Today is the 11th of June, and the news is that the US House of Representatives has given final approval to the new Department of Homeland Security budget. What can I say about this? It will go to the president’s desk. Now. He’s expected to sign it. It includes within it a rough quadrupling of funding for immigration, Customs Enforcement and border control. 

That’s on top of the $75 billion that was part of the big, beautiful bill from last year. And this is for an agency that normally has a total budget of about $10 billion. So over the four year term, this is about a quadrupling of the budget. Now, lots of people are going to say lots of things about immigration and human rights and thuggery in general. 

I’m going to leave those topics to them. Not that they’re pointless, but they’re just not mine. I want to hit this from the point of view where everyone is going to feel it. The United States now is seeing more of its population dying than being born, and the largest generation in American history. The baby boomers are mostly retired, and by the end of this decade, they will all be retired. 

Which means that if you want a growing labor market and the growing economy that goes with it, you need to get the people from somewhere other than natural birth. And the only option until we have cloning, like really good cloning, is immigration. And with this sort of system, at least for the rest of this decade, that’s functionally impossible. 

So that means that every pressure you’re feeling in the economy on the affordability question is about to get significantly worse, because there just isn’t going to be enough people to make everything function. Industries that’ll be hurt hardest. Our agriculture services and health care and construction. Those are the places where people who are not born in the United States tend to carry a disproportionate load. 

So for those of you who are older, look forward to spending lots of long hours and hospitals in a bedpan that hasn’t been changed. For those of you who like to move into new homes, get used to those being significantly more expensive because we won’t have the labor to build them. And for those of you who are used to going to things like restaurants, expect those tables to not turn around because there’s nobody cleaning the dishes. 

And in agriculture, we’ll still be able to do row crop pretty well. But as you get into, say, meats where people are, the animals have to be herded. That’s usually done by immigrant later. And when you’re dealing with fruits and vegetables, where that has to be handpicked immigrant labor as well. So everything gets more expensive on a secular basis now. 

And even if the day Donald Trump leaves office or this term ends and Ice is more reformed, if that’s the right term, and all of a sudden immigration picks back up to something that’s closer to the half century average, it will take another ten years for that to feed into the system. So we are guaranteed now to have significantly higher inflation than we needed to. 

That’s piece one. Piece two is that this is not an annual budget. This is a budget that is designed to fund these agencies through the remainder of Trump’s term, outside of the normal budgeting process. Now, under normal circumstances, Congress would never agree to this because that takes all of the power away from Congress. Congress has the power of the purse, the House specifically, and transfers it to the executive for the remainder of the term by the time Trump signs this, it’ll be codified into law. A couple things from that. Number one, the executive now has full authority to use this however he wants. Congressional check is gone. We’ve been talking on and off for the last few years about how the United States is going through a political transition, with both the Republican and the Democratic Party basically breaking down. 

This basically completes that process for the Republican Party. Trump has ejected a number of high ranking senators and House members via primaries. They’ll be gone in November, and the number that remain are going to be so isolated that they really can’t do anything. They’ve had this last stand, this last two weeks, where they’ve stood up to Trump on a number of issues, and now that is effectively over because they’ve lost their leverage. 

That means that the Republican Party is gone. It’s no longer the party of business or national security or rule of law, certainly not a fiscal conservatism. And this will accelerate what’s next, because we’re not going to have several years of the political right in the United States being completely nonfunctional outside of the person of Donald Trump personally, from a Democratic point of view, from an organizational point of view, this is generally pretty bad. 

It also means that whatever his whim is, is now state policy. And there are really no checks in the congressional branch of government. And so we’ve been seeing these cavalcade and compounding mistakes by Trump, whether it’s in negotiations with Iran or with Russia or domestic regulation or with the tariff policies. All of that is going to accelerate now, because the last of the folks who might have provided some ballast are gone now. 

And this law means that he doesn’t even have to consult anybody. Which means it really doesn’t matter to me what happens in the midterms. Because Trump has barely gone to Congress at all in his first year and a half in office. And now that he’s gutted what’s left of the Republican Party, and even if the Democrats managed to retake both houses of Congress, why would he go to Congress again when the priorities he has have already been funded for the rest of this term? The only way you could change that is if Congress decided to rescind this funding. But that would have to overcome a presidential veto, which requires a two thirds majority. 

So that’s just not going to happen. So all hail the King. He’s got what he needs to do, whatever he wants on the issues that he cares about as long as he’s alive or in office. And yes, there is some gray area between those two.

Insulating the President with Loyalists

Bill Pulte, New Director of National Intelligence official portrait

It looks like we have a new acting Director of National Intelligence, Bill Pulte. You may know his name as he’s both a housing executive and the current head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

So, we’ve got a new Director with at least two full-time jobs and no meaningful experience in intelligence…yeah, that sounds about par for the Trump Administration’s nominations. But at least Gabbard is out of the office.

Anyways, this move will likely result in the intelligence agencies losing influence in presidential decision-making and reinforces the trend of Trump isolating himself from anyone smarter than him.

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Transcript

Hey everybody, Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Vegas. Had to find a quiet corner for this one was a little hard with all the people running around anyhow. Today we’re talking about the new acting Director of National Intelligence. Guy by the name of Bill Pulte. If you’re familiar with homebuilding, Pulte homes that Bill Pulte. He already has a position in the government. 

He’s a Trump loyalist. And he’s appointed to the civic of this right FH for the Federal Housing and Financing Agency, which is responsible for, among other things, back stopping about 70% of American mortgages. So big job. And most of the insurance agencies under FHFA, most notably Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are in conservatorship and have been since the financial crisis. 

So it’s a big, important full time job. The fact that he comes from housing and is now managing the mortgaging system suggests a conflict of interest. When he was going through confirmation hearing year, several senators piped up about that, most notably Elizabeth Warren. But you know, she hates everybody, so it’s hard to take that too seriously. 

Anyway, he has now been deputized as the acting head of national intelligence, and his job there is to coordinate the dozen plus federal agencies that have intelligence arms, everybody from the NSA and the CIA to law enforcement. Anyway, that is a full time job as well. And what it really tells us is President Trump, doesn’t really care about the national security agencies at all, and he certainly doesn’t want them talking to him about what’s going on in the world. 

Trump feels the need to be the smartest person in the room. And if somebody from the intelligence agency is there talking about Moldova or Kyrgyzstan or Bolivia, they will obviously know them more than the president about that topic. And so they’re just not allowed into the room. Now, the outgoing director of national intelligence was Tulsi Gabbard, who had some foreign leanings and so seen her gone as great, but now replacing her with somebody who is completely unskilled and there’s no background in intelligence or military affairs or project management is really not great either. 

About the only good news I can say is at least this guy is not beholden to foreign interests like Tulsi Gabbard was. He’s a loyalist, so he’s unlikely to tell Trump anything that he doesn’t want to hear. Which probably means that all of the intelligence’s basically now have a ceiling above them, between them and the president. So Trump is continuing to go down this path of being the least informed leader that we have had in modern history. 

The only other one that is even remotely in the same bucket would be Barack Obama, who was famous for not wanting anyone in the room at all. This is just the other side of that coin. So good news. Not really. But considering that Donald Trump doesn’t have anyone in his circle with real foreign policy experience except for Marco Rubio, who has similarly been banished and now heads two agencies State Department, for the similar purposes of keeping him in arm’s length from the president, keeping those institutions away from the president. It’s kind of par for the course.

The U.S. Gets a Taste of Corruption

Photo of a bronze trump doll on stacks of 0 bills

Trump is no stranger to helping out his cronies, but this new settlement that creates a $1.8 billion fund to compensate conservatives allegedly targeted by past Justice Department actions is a bit on the nose, even for him.

This slush fund is a reminder of the legal and regulatory erosion that the Trump administration is responsible for. The rule-of-law system that has supported the U.S. economy and government is now on some very shaky ground.

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Transcript

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Vasto, Italy. Today is the 18th of May. You’ll see this later in the week. Short version is. We’ve probably had the single biggest step backward in rule of law in the United States of the second Trump term, which is, you know, saying it’s saying something in of itself. And the fact that I’m telling you this from Italy is a little concerning. 

The short version is today, the Trump administration settled a lawsuit that had brought against the US government while Trump was president. So basically Trump suing Trump and then settling with Trump to establish a slush fund of about 1.8 billion USD. Technically, it’s $1,000,000,776 million to compensate conservatives who have been prosecuted by the Justice Department in the past. Everyone who has been shortlisted to get a payout, as somebody who is one of Trump’s close political allies and in essence, this is a slush fund. 

This is the sort of operation that people in Italy have been telling you, like even the most crooked of our politicians would have never dreamed of doing something so obvious and brazen. This has a lot more in common with how Nigerian governments in recent decades have handled slush funds, basically suing yourself, controlling both sides of the negotiation, and then handing out the money to whoever you wanted to in the first place. 

Although even Nigeria has moved away from that model in the last 20 years, the most recent governments to do things like this were Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela and Hugo Chavez. This is hardly the first time the Trump administration in round two has done this. I really doubt it’ll be the last. The judge that oversaw the settlement basically said in legal terms, what the actual fuck? 

But here we are. This is what happens when you have an executive who sees the rule of law as part of the problem, rather than part of the solution. We should expect significantly more things like this. And this kind of dovetails with what has functionally happened with the tariff situation. Whereas the tariffs policies have changed so often that the only way that you can stay ahead of them is to have a really good relationship with the regulator, which is another way to say bribery. 

What was the other comparison I wanted to make? Give me a minute. It’ll come to me. Oh yeah. On the regulatory question, the Trump administration has gutted several of the regulatory bodies so that enforcement of the regulations that are on the books, even some of them from Trump, one can’t really be done in a timely manner, but they’re not bothering to staff these agencies with people who could strip out regulations from, say, the Obama or the Biden years. 

They’re just telling companies to not abide by them and put themselves in deep legal jeopardy that that a future administration might come after the before. But the Trump administration is saying, you know, all you have to do is not follow the law in its current form, and we’re not going to prosecute you. So it’s breaking down the rule of law that allows us business to be the most dynamic in the world. 

And basically following a model that the Russians had during the 1990s and the 2000, where you deliberately have conflicting guidance from the Kremlin and from law and from regulation, and the only way to stay on the positive side of that is to bribe everyone in sight. So mazel tov from Italy, a country that used to be run this way but found a different way.

MAGA – Breaking Up Is Hard

President Tump with a MAGA face mask over his mouth

When Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, and Alex Jones all turn on Trump on the same day…it’s worth looking into.

These figures have all suckled at the MAGA teat for years, but it seems the milk may have finally soured. But is this really all an organic change, or is there someone pulling at the strings behind the scenes? It makes an awful lot of sense for the Russians to cause fractures in MAGA to weaken the U.S. position.

They say breakups are hard, so we’ll see how MAGA and the broader U.S. political sphere handle this fragmentation.

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Transcript

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here. It’s the 11th of April. I’m coming to you from Colorado, and today we’re going to talk about what’s happened in the MAGA sphere over the last about seven days, we have had a number of personalities, ranging from Marjorie Taylor Greene to Tucker Carlson to Alex Jones, Nick Fuentes, to. Oh, who was that really crazy bitch, Candace Owens? 

Oh, my God. Anyway, some of the worst of the worst, people who have been spouting propaganda and, lies and incrimination and just making up all kinds of conspiracy theories for the last decade, all of them have turned on Trump all at once, and they’re now all saying things that, you know, honestly, would come out of the squad on the Democratic left really? 

Well, calling Trump a mad king, genocidal evil. My personal favorite. He’s probably the Antichrist. Let’s start by saying that none of these are nice people. All of them are horrible. And all of them have basically lied to all of their followers for a long time. So if you’re a follower and you’re seeing this, you have been had over and over and over and over and over again. 

But the fact that they all switched almost on the same day tells me that this is not a one off. This is an organized effort. Now, every single one of these people, if they’re not active Russian agents, the Russians have a pipe into their brains where they’ve been funneling propaganda that they may go on to vomit in front of their followers. 

Nothing’s new there. That’s not particularly controversial, even for them, but for them to all switch at the same time. That suggests that the Russians, since an opportunity, see, one of the things that people get wrong about Trump and the Russians is that Trump doesn’t owe Putin and Putin doesn’t control Trump. Trump is just really easy to manipulate, and Putin has been manipulating him. 

Now Putin has used all of these conspiracy theories to break up the Republican Party from the inside, basically break down the capacity of the business interests and the national security interests and the fiscal voters to basically control the rest of the party. And so it’s turned over into MAGA. And that means that MAGA is the single most coherent voting bloc that the United States has right now, arguably the largest and most consolidated voting bloc that the United States has ever seen in its history. 

And as the most powerful force in American politics, that puts it on Putin’s radar, because Putin’s goal has never been to get a friendly person in the American presidency. Putin’s goal Russia’s goal has always been to break the American political system so it can’t function. And if MAGA is now the most powerful part of the American political system, then it is now a target. 

And with the Iran war, the Russians have sensed an opportunity. So the goal isn’t for Putin to go after Trump per se, but to break the capacity of market a function. And if that drives the line between MAGA and the president, so much the better. So he’s using these people who have been borderline to outrageously, traitorous over the last few years to now turn all at the same time and basically set the Trump alliance on fire. 

It’s a good strategy. It’s a really good strategy because there really isn’t anything else coherent in the American political system right now. The question, of course, is whether Donald Trump realizes that this is how it’s been all along, because he’s always assumed that all of these people, including Putin, worship him. That’s never been true. And he’ll have to do an ego adjustment if he wants to come to grips with what’s happening now. 

But it’s unclear whether Trump has mentally degraded too far to even absorb that simple fact. And if he hasn’t, then we really are not just looking at the end of the Republican Party, which I would argue already happened. We are looking at the end of MAGA as a unified political force. Whether that is good or bad, of course, depends upon how you view the country, the world, American politics and how things are going to evolve or devolve in the next year.

Trump Goes on a Firing Spree

Donald Trump speaking at a podium and looking intense | Photo by Wikimedia Commons: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/90/Donald_Trump_speaking_at_CPAC_2011_by_Mark_Taylor.jpg

Just because Trump is finally purging some of his administration doesn’t mean that the problems are going away. The core issue still exists: Trump prioritizes loyalty and praise over competency and experience.

Trump even fires people for the wrong reasons. While these officials could be ineffective or downright damaging in their roles, they won’t feel the wrath of Trump until they do something that pisses him off personally or politically.

And the scariest part is that there is no longer a cadre of replacements to pull from, since Trump dismantled the Republican institution.

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Transcript

Hey, all. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. A lot of people on the Patreon page have asked me what I think of the recent firings by Donald Trump of a couple of his cabinet members, at Department of Homeland Security. Kristi Noem is now gone and has been basically put into a pointless position, to oversee a summit that will probably never happen again. 

And Pam Bondi, the former attorney general now, is also gone. And so the question is this this is the start of a general bloodletting. You know, let me let me start with the simple stuff. Trump is erratic. So I don’t really know. But let me underline that. It really doesn’t matter. The president chooses co-leaders based on his own interests and his own style. 

And we have learned over the past five years that Trump does not want advice. He wants worship. So if you go back to Trump one, he really did not expect that he was going to win. So the Republican Party, specifically the former governor of Oklahoma, helped him staff out the government with people from throughout the Republican establishment. And so he came in with a lot of people that he personally knew her trusted. 

And he proceeded to almost fire all of them during the course of his first administration. He actually cycled through more cabinet secretaries than any other three American presidents in history. What we discovered was that whenever somebody was in the room who offered him good advice, that was usually because they had studied the topic and knew something about it, and that made him feel like he wasn’t the smartest person in the conversation. 

So when he was out of power, he took over the Republican institution, the party itself, and purged it of the research arm and the recruitment arm so that that could never happen again. So when he came in for his second term, there was no longer a pool of talent to draw from. In fact, the Republican Party no longer has a pool of talent to draw from. 

And so he installed people who would tell him what he wants to hear. Or, to be perfectly blunt, just praise him without any reason. And that is the bulk of the cabinet today. And if you look at the senior leadership throughout the government, we still have over a thousand positions that haven’t been filled. Things like, say, the ambassador to Russia or the, surgeon general. 

This is as much by design as anything else. So when you’re hoping that he’ll fire somebody in the cabinet who wasn’t any good at their job, keep in mind that they weren’t picked because they would be good at their job. They were picked because they couldn’t be good at their job. And any replacements going to fall into the same bucket. 

So let’s go through the candidates that are everyone’s talking about that are likely to get fired. I don’t know if they’re going to be, but, that, you know, they’re on the list. First up is at Commerce, Howard Lutton. Now, I have spoken to no one who is in the financial world in New York who has said anything other than he was the most corrupt person in New York. 

And so they all thought he would be a perfect fit for Trump Commerce. And it sounds like that’s exactly what’s gone down. The Trump policy when it comes to tariffs is incredibly erratic. We have now had over 7000 changes to tariff policy. So businesses within the United States just don’t know what the rules of the game are. 

And we’ve seen industrial construction spending steadily drop for the 14 months of the Trump presidency so far, to the point now that if you remove data center construction, we’re actually below where we were for new builds during Covid of all times. It’s getting very, very bad. But for let’s take this as an opportunity. What it seems to be happening is his family is selling access to lightning, specifically at Commerce. 

And lightning is selling his personal access in order to get people exemptions on the tariff list. So a remarkably corrupt setup. Trump knows this. Trump has no problem with this. Trump’s problem with Hutnik is that apparently the big family was very tight with the Epstein group, years ago. And so that has prevented the team issue from fading into the ether. 

So if Mick is going to be fired, it’s not because he’s doing a horrible job at Congress and crushing American economic activity and becoming rich in the process. It’ll be because of child molestation, apparently, or something like that. I really try not to follow Epstein. Okay. Next up, RFK Jr at, Health and Human Services. This guy is a full on nut bag. 

This is the guy who is making up studies in order to say that, vaccines shouldn’t be part of our system. This is the guy that says that the way to fix heart disease is to double your consumption of beef tallow. I mean, he is he is certifiable. And he’s undoubtedly causing massive damage to American health long term because decisions that are made by parents. 

Now, when your kids are young are going to affect their health their entire life. And this is grossly going in the wrong direction. Trump has no problem with that. What Trump has a problem with is that RFK is sucking up a lot of the oxygen in the room, and the Maha group, and they call themselves, Make America Healthy Again is now starting to split with the president because Trump just can’t stand sharing the stage. 

It’s a PR issue. I mentioned that the surgeon general, still hasn’t been filled. It’s been 14 months. It’s one of the most important jobs in the government and the only person who has been appointed. So far is a literal quack. Okay. Moving on. My personal favorite, Tulsi Gabbard. If she’s not a Russian agent, she clearly aspires to be one. 

She is had an anti-American position on every foreign policy question for the last 20 years, and now she’s in a position where she aggregates all of the intelligence that comes in from all of the bureaus and departments, and provides the president with a daily brief. And she, of course, aggressively edits that. So the president can’t possibly be informed. 

Most of the positions she’s taken so far in the administration have been purely pro-Russian, designed to denigrate American power. But that is not the problem that Donald Trump has with her. The problem that he has is that she doesn’t support the war in Iran. And so she actually testified to Congress, one of the few true things she’s ever said, that there is no evidence that Iran was, actively developing a bomb in a way that was any closer to who they had been over the last five, ten, 15, 20 years. 

True. Trump didn’t like hearing that. So now he’s talking about getting rid of her. Next up, Kash Patel at the FBI Patel. He’s one of the candidates for one of the stupidest people in the administration. He has no experience in law enforcement, just like Tulsi Gabbard. No experience in intelligence or management. 

And he’s a conspiracy theorist, and he came in basically knowing nothing about the job. And one of the first things that he did is remove people from counterterror investigations, kidnaping investigations, new color theft investigations, and sent them to Home Depots to arrest day laborers. He has wrecked the training system for the FBI. He’s done incalculable damage to American law enforcement long term at the federal level. 

Trump is aware of all these things. He has no problem with any of these things. His problem with Cash Patel is that he has proven so incompetent that he can’t prosecute Donald Trump’s political foes. Now, this is an impossible ask, because Trump accuses his foes of doing things that they just haven’t done. And I realize that there’s some people in MAGA that are going to scream at that, but tough. 

No facts whatsoever have ever been presented that Trump lost the last election, or that Trump doesn’t get along very well with the Russians. This is the same reason that Pam Bondi was ultimately dismissed because she realized that there was no relevance to these cases, and so she slow walked him and only prosecuted them in order to stay in Trump’s good graces. Kash Patel is basically in the same bucket. And if this is how Trump defines success, he will never be satisfied with anyone who is FBI director or attorney general. Competing with cash Patel for the dumbest person in the administration is Pete Hegseth at defense, the guy who, during his confirmation hearing, proudly proclaimed that he would be the least qualified defense secretary in American history. 

And while he was right, he still hasn’t appointed a chief of staff, so he’s still not even capable of scheduling a meeting among the Joint Chiefs without using their staff, much less the rest of the Defense Department. He’s gone through, and he’s wrecked some of the academy work. He’s certainly interfered with mid-career training. He’s interfered with the promotion process to make sure that no women or minorities are promoted. And as a result, he’s come into clashes with others of the senior staff within the, Defense Department. The big things has happened the last few weeks is that the Army chief of staff was fired because he objected to what Hegseth was doing with the promotions program. 

The chief chaplain was fired because the chaplain thinks that got. Oh, God, this is so awful. The chaplain believes that soldier should have a relationship with their spiritual side, whatever that happens to be. And Trump’s like, unless you’re going to be a crusader, fuck off. We’re now at the point that the Pope and the arch bishop of military services are now taking some pretty strong stances against Hegseth personally. 

And Hegseth is using Crusader language to justify the war in Iran, but having absolutely nothing to do with the manager of the conflict itself. Trump knows all of this, has no problems with any of it. But Trump realizes in his heart of hearts that the Iran war is not going nearly as well as he would like, and Pete Hegseth has now manifested himself as a potential scapegoat. 

So a couple of the firings that Hegseth did over the last week were potential competitors for his job. And so he fired them preemptively. Now, the point of all of this is that it’s not that these people should be fired. Of course they should all be fired. They should have never been selected in the first place. They certainly should have never been confirmed by the Senate. 

But they have been. And if Trump fires all of them, there is zero expectation that we’ll get anyone better. I make part of my living by being in a conference speaker. So I go around the country talking about geopolitics and economics, and where it takes the people in the room, and I try to stick around to see the other speakers. 

And typically you’re going to have a couple of economists and a couple of political speakers. And when you bring in a political speaker, they always try to get someone from both sides that has collapsed in the last year. What we’ve discovered is that there’s no one in the business community or academia or in security studies that believes in anything that Donald Trump is doing. 

There is no Cordray out there for MAGA that is rooted in anything real. It’s just ideology. So I have not been to an event in the last year where anyone has spoken on behalf of the MAGA movement, unless it’s been a direct representative from the administration itself. And most of those guys clearly don’t know what they’re talking about. 

What is evolved over the last 14 months is that the business community has kind of gotten fed up with what’s going on, and is starting to change its mind. The business community has been a core part of the Republican coalition, going back to the last reformation of the Republican Party during the depression, and now they realize it’s finally sinking in, that they’ve been kicked out of the coalition, and they’re only now starting to kind of tack. 

That’s kind of piece. One of all of this is that we’re seeing people who have always thought of themselves as Republican, realizing that they’re just not anymore. The second piece is if Trump decides to fire these people, he then is supposed to replace them. But there are no candidates that are more competent than the incompetent people that he would be letting go. 

And what has changed, in part because the business community is there a handful of Republican senators who have kind of woken up to the danger that Donald Trump is not just to the country, but to the party in? They’re for their own personal futures. It’s a little late to the game, but we haven’t seen any meaningful movement on Trump’s appointees confirmation for months now. 

And so if we get a new defense secretary, a new, attorney general, new FBI director, somebody new at HHS, I’ll say it’s a clean sweep. The candidates aren’t going to be any better. And the willingness of Congress to give him a second chance to run with people who were chosen because they were incompetent is pretty low. So we’re more likely to see more problems at the white House, more inconsistencies, more incompetence. 

And if you look back in the last several months, oh my God, the bar is already really high. But if you look at how Trump has been reacting in public since the Iran war started, you can see he’s very clearly losing his grip and getting frustrated. And the fact that his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, is probably the most competent person in the cabinet, is suffering, unfortunately, from breast cancer and so hasn’t been able to put in the time. 

She has always been kind of the Trump whisperer. And with her and a reduced role, there’s nothing left between Trump and the rest of the world. And that is starting to really show. I call it a failed presidency, but we were already there. We’re now looking at something worse. An old guy who is really frustrated, who has started a lot of problems he can’t solve, even with a good team who has no team at all. 

This is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

How to End American Power

Fist raised with an American flag in it | Licensed by Envato Elements: https://app.envato.com/search/photos/939fd782-14f6-41bc-a6c2-37f108609543?itemType=photos&term=american+power&sort=relevance

Trump’s latest statement telling countries to secure their own oil dismantles the very fabric of the global order. We’d be stepping away from the post-WWII system where the U.S. provided security for everyone, so economic growth could be the priority.

Forcing everyone to secure their own resources takes us back about a century, triggering conflicts and competition over resource control. This move weakens America’s global position, as power projection will be challenged and former allies turn into rivals.

This move jeopardizes America’s long-term strategic power and could lead to a collapse…comparable to the fall of the Soviet Union.

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Transcript

Hey, all Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. Today is the 31st of March, and we, we’re having some fun things. On Donald Trump’s truth social account. So the big news is that Trump has said, NATO is pretty much finished, and all of the countries that want crude from the Persian Gulf now need to come and get it themselves and just take it. 

If you read the line which will print here, basically what he’s asking for is a return to the colonial era when each individual country maintained its own independent military forces, especially naval forces, and in doing so, looked after its own, economic issues. 

The reason we do things today, the way we have been for the last 35 years, is we know that that model guarantees inter-state conflict. There’s two big layers to it. The first is that if you maintain colonies, you’re fighting to control those colonies. In the case of the Persian Gulf, this is actually probably one of the easier places to do it, because so much of the population is dependent upon physical infrastructure, like, say, desalination. 

And so maintaining a degree of control is relatively manpower light versus the economic assets you get. You’ll have to manage those populations. You might have to move some of those population. You may have to kill a lot of those populations. But, from a purely technical point of view, it’s not too bad. The second problem is that everyone will have their own preferences as to where the resources go, i.e. home. 

So you are guaranteeing a degree of inter-state conflict among the oil importers, because they will all now need to have their own naval forces in order to secure shipments from point of production in the Persian Gulf to points of consumption, primarily back in Europe or East Asia. 

One of the things that really worked about globalization is we basically told everybody, you don’t need a military anymore because we will take care of that. So if you do maintain a military, it doesn’t need to be big. And if there is a fight, we will defend you and we will take full control of what military forces you do have. 

And what that did is it cleared the board. And every major power in world history, with the exception of Russia, was now, for the first time, on the same side under the NATO flag or the American flag, based on where you were. And the United States basically made all the security decisions, with very little debate, I might add. 

Moving away from that system to a situation where each individual power has their own military and is looking out for their own economic interests, is going to take us back to what we had roughly in 1930 when we were industrialized. And so everyone realized they needed crude oil. 

But now, with a whole new layer of technologies and things like drones, it’s difficult to overstate how much of a tidal shift this is, because American military power for the last 75 years has been based on the concept or the sole decision making. We’re the sole arbiter, and what we say goes, what Trump is now doing is deliberately forcing all of the allies to establish an independent military posture with independent military forces to look after their independent economic needs, because he doesn’t want to do it himself, said so very, very explicitly. 

In that world, we will have taken every major power in world history that still exists today and forced them to move away from the American umbrella and to set up their own independent system. And no matter what version the future holds, we are never going to see eye to eye with all of them in that sort of scenario. 

What part of what made globalization work part of it for the American alliance system work is we removed the military side of the equation from their thinking so they could focus entirely on the economic. And if you want to undo that deal, that’s, you know, there’s a conversation to be had there, but abrogated in this way and basically forcing everybody to take up arms for their own economic issues. 

It’s turning the clock back to the weakest American security has ever been. And that’s in the 1930s. So the situation we have now is we’re not simply guaranteeing more colonial conflicts. We’re not simply guaranteeing more inter-state conflicts. We’re guaranteeing the fastest reduction in American strategic power in our lifetimes and arguably in the history of the Republic. Because while the US military may be first and foremost in the world, especially when it comes to the Navy deliberately ending the basing agreements, deliberately fostering demanding competition is going to land us in a world of hurt. 

Ten, 20, 30, 40, 50 years from now. And we’re only now in the early second year of this administration. There is a lot of time to make this truth social post, which Trump deeply believes is the right thing. There’s a lot of time to make it stick. And if you look at what has happened in the last year with Donald Trump threatening invasion of NATO allies because he couldn’t get a chunk of ice, I’m concerned that we’re already well past the point of no return, and we’re now in a situation where the US military has to figure out how to close down its entire constellation of bases on a global basis and start building contingency plans for fights with all of the countries that have been on our side for the last 75 years, at a minimum, best case scenario, none of those fights happen, but it still means a massive reduction in America’s military global footprint and its ability to project power beyond the Western Hemisphere. So we are at the beginning of the greatest collapse in strategic power that I have seen in my life, the only similar situation that comes even remotely close would be the Soviet collapse, at the end of the Cold War. 

But if you look at the Soviet empire at that time, it was not nearly as global. What the United States has now. Most of their retreats were far closer to home, say the loss of Central Europe, for example, we’re looking here at the United States becoming unwelcome, not just in the Middle East, but in Europe and probably in East Asia. 

And we’re actively pushing to create strategic competitors for a generation or two from now. That is quite possibly the most fucking stupid thing that we could do. And yet here, here we are.

How to Break Iran

A ripped grungy back wall of the Iranian flag

If the U.S. wants to force a meaningful change in Iran’s government, there’s only one path forward. They have to destabilize the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

The IRGC has become the center of power in Iran. While leadership is divided into three groups, the IRGC is the military-economic network that controls industry and enforces domestic control. Given Iran’s fragmentation and ethnic diversity, internal stability is essential. Should the IRGC’s revenue streams fall in the war, internal fractures would form.

If the younger members begin seeking power over the older elites who control the wealth, a civil conflict would erupt. Of course, it would be extremely destabilizing not only for Iran but also for the region.

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Transcript

Hey, all. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. Sorry. Fever broke last night, so I’m better, but I’m still kind of weak. Where was I? Most of our coverage of the Iran war at this point is about what’s been blowing up the energy side of things. Strait of Hormuz, all that good stuff. Today, I wanted to go a different direction and talk about what might, might, might change in Iran that would end the war the way the United States would be really excited about, what I’m going to say isn’t necessarily how it’s going to go, but if we are going to break the Iranian government, it’ll look like this. 

So the Iranian government basically has three big chunks that matter. First, you’ve got your supreme leader and surrounding the supreme leader are all of the people who are in charge of the guns and the overall strategy. So the intelligence minister, the defense minister, the people who are in charge of the IRGC, that is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is a militia that controls most of the day to day operations and, the country and among these groups controls all of their overseas assets and their influences throughout the Middle East, whether that is militants in Syria, Hezbollah, Shia in Iraq or what have you. A lot of these people, at least at the top, have now been killed. The Supreme leader’s gone. The new Supreme leader was selected, but his parents is one of his kids, and his wife has been killed. 

The defense minister has been killed. And on and on and on. It’s not that this group is not functional, but it means that they’ve handed power down to the IRGC. More on them in a minute. The second group are the political and economic leadership that run the day to day operations of the country. The president, for example, the economics minister, the energy minister. 

For the most part, these people have not been targeted by the Americans and the Israelis because they’re not responsible for most of the policies that the Americans and the Israelis find problematic. So when you see Iran going up and mucking up the region, these aren’t the people responsible. These are the people, for the most part, stay at home. 

And they’ve been mostly left alone. But then you’ve got the IRGC, and that’s very different. A couple things to keep in mind. Number one, Iran is not a normal country. It’s all mountainous. And in each mountain valley you have a different ethnicity. And so how the Persians came to control this territory is they expanded out of their original mountain home in Persepolis and then went to the next valley over and conquered and intermingled with those people, and then to a third and a fourth and a fifth, and eventually did that a thousand times. 

So when people talk about the thousand nations of Persia, they’re not exaggerating. This is a multi-ethnic society that has been trying to slowly grind its minorities into amalgamation for several thousand years, and today they’re only about half completed. Only 51% of Iranians identify as Persians. Now all the others still identify as Iranian. I’m not suggesting that there’s like a really robust opportunity here for multiple fifth columns, but it does shape the decision making, and it’s pretty clear that it’s the Persians who are in control of all the major decisions, especially the IRGC, the IRGC, plus the military. 

Its primary job is to make sure that 49% of the population who are not Persian never get persnickety and rise up. So in many cases, the Iranian military force is primarily designed to occupy its own country. 

All right. That’s the background you need for us to get into the real stuff. Now let’s talk about what can happen. The clerical class that is part of those first two categories, the supreme leader chunk and the more technocratic chunk. 

That’s 10,000 people. And so if you wanted to destroy the political system of a country, that’s a lot of folks that you have to drop bombs on. And undoubtedly we’ve managed to do so for, for at least a couple hundred that were at the top. But there are always going to be more people waiting in the wings to step up and get into the big chair, even during a war. 

So grinding through that entire class, which was basically would be a religious war, going after all the priests, is something that just really isn’t viable unless you’re going to put 1 million or 2 million troops on the ground in Iran to go through a country that’s twice the size of Texas with three times the population and root out each individual one, not really viable. 

And then there’s the IRGC links to the clerical class, but more generally not of the clerical class. These are people about a quarter of a million to a half a million strong, based on whose numbers you’re using, who are also responsible for domestic pacification. 

So whenever there is an uprising the IRGC comes in and starts shooting people. They also have very good relations with, say, the Syrians and especially the Russians. And so the Russians provide them with technology to track down people who are using cell phones or Starlink and basically get them in their homes and then remove them from the equation. Not nice people, but where there might might be a weakness in the IRGC model, it’s not in the guns. 

Then the money. IRGC is self-funding. They control broad swaths of the Iranian economy from energy projects that they have forced private sector players out to the electricity system, which they control half of, to any sort of smuggled good. And since Iran is one of the most sanctioned countries in history, pretty much anything that is imported is smuggled at some level. 

And that means that they have a vast array of income streams that add up to the tens of billions of dollars every year, and that money train is what entices people to join the IRGC. So today, we’re in a position where the senior political leadership around the supreme leader has been neutered or is at least in hiding. And the IRGC, in many ways, is the face of the regime now, because power devolve down to them, because they control a lot of military assets, including the missile program, the nuclear program, the shadow program. 

And so when they see their interests get hit, waves of shitheads come out. So if you remember last week, Israel bombed part of a facility called the South Pars natural gas field, which is where the country gets the 70% of their natural gas. That natural gas is used to make power that hit the IRGC directly. 

So they sent out 50 different attacks into various places across the entire region, and in doing so, made it very clear that they were perfectly willing to burn down all the energy infrastructure in the region if their economic interests are hurt. But if you really do want to change the government, you have to break the IRGC. Now, since there’s over a quarter of a million of them, there’s no way, even with a ground invasion, that you’re going to go in there and root them all out. 

So you have to change the economic math here. It’s a generational issue. Ever since the Shah fell back in 79, there has been a baby bust and a consolidation of power among the people who were alive before that. And so we’ve seen the leadership of Iran, as a rule, get over and over and over. 

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t young people there just fewer young people than there are old people. And how the demographic issue is playing out with the IRGC is you have a lot of people in their 20s and 30s and maybe even into their 40s that have never really tasted power, and they see their elders absorbing most of the profits from the smuggling and the energy in the electricity sector and construction and everything else. And they’re beginning to wonder with the war, when is my time? 

Well, if the IRGC economic aspects get crushed in the war, then you might be able to generate this sort of uprising from within the Corps itself with the younger folks, the Young Turks, if you will, going against the older folks at the moment. That is the only path forward that I see where the United States might actually be able to change the regime in the country, forcing basically a civil war in the IRGC itself. 

It would not be easy. And every time you go after the IRGC economic assets, you know, they’re going to hit the economic assets of the broader Gulf. But at this point, we have at least another 4 or 5 weeks of the war before the batch of Marines that are coming in from California arrive. And in that time, we’re probably going to lose most of that anyway. 

So we’re already talking about the Persian Gulf being removed from the mechanics of global economics permanently. The question is whether or not you want to also try as part of that process to remove the IRGC. It’s an ugly way to do it, but at the moment, it’s the only real weakness in the way that Iran is set up that I think might be able to be exploited.