Transcription
Okay? So, let me start with something that happened today. Today, as in in the last 24 hours, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy released a statement. And what they said is this, 28 vessels crossed the Strait of Hormuz. 28 ships, oil tankers, container ships, commercial cargo vessels, and every single one of them crossed after receiving permits from Iran. Not from the United States Navy, not from any international maritime authority, from Iran. Okay? Let that sit for just a moment.
Now, at the same time this was happening, on the other side of the world in Washington, Donald Trump walked into the situation room. The situation room, if you don't know, is the room in the White House where presidents make the biggest wartime decisions. He sat down with his advisers, he looked at the proposals, and then he left. No decision, nothing signed, nothing announced. He just walked out.
You have this extraordinary situation where on the same day, on May 31st, 2026, the most powerful military in the history of the world cannot force a decision from its own president, and the country that has been under American sanctions for 45 years is collecting fees from ships that want to use the world's most important waterway. Okay?
Now, here is the thing. Most of the analysis you are going to read today in the newspapers, on the news channels, in the opinion columns, is going to focus on the question, will Trump sign a deal or not? Will there be a ceasefire? What are the terms? Who is winning the negotiation? And I want to tell you that this is the wrong question, okay? It is completely the wrong question. And today I want to walk you through what the right question actually is, because I think once you understand what is really happening here, once you see the structural picture, not just the daily headlines, everything becomes clear in a way that it simply is not when you are just watching the news cycle.
So, here's a plan for today. First, I'm going to talk about why I think the entire debate about the Thucydides Trap, which is dominating the conversation among foreign policy intellectuals right now, is actually a distraction. Then, I am going to introduce you to something called the Kindleberger Trap. And I am going to show you why this, not Thucydides, is the real framework for understanding what is happening in the world right now. Then, I'm going to show you the chess game. Because Iran in this war has been playing chess at a level that most analysts simply have not been willing to acknowledge. And then, I'm going to talk about taco and nacho. And I know those sound funny, but they are not funny. They are actually extremely revealing about the structural failure that is unfolding in front of us. Okay? Let's go.
All right. On May 14th and 15th, 2026, Xi Jinping sat down with Donald Trump at a summit in Beijing. And at that summit, Xi Jinping said something that immediately dominated the conversation among foreign policy analysts around the world. He asked, and I am summarizing here, whether China and United States could overcome what he called the Thucydides Trap. And immediately, every think tank, every academic, every columnist started writing about the Thucydides Trap. Is it real? Is it inevitable? Can it be escaped? Okay?
Now, let me tell you what the Thucydides Trap actually is. It is a concept developed by a professor at Harvard named Graham Allison. The idea comes from the ancient Greek historian Thucydides, who wrote about the war between Athens and Sparta. And the concept is this: when a rising power threatens to overtake an established dominant power, the result is almost always war. Allison looked at 16 historical cases, 12 of them ended in conflict. So, when Xi Jinping invokes this idea, he's making a specific argument. He is saying China is the rising power, America is the established power. History says this leads to war, and therefore America should accommodate China's rise rather than resist it.
Now, I want to point out something that a scholar named Miles Yu at the Hudson Institute has raised, and which I find very important. If you go back to the original story, the Peloponnesian War, who actually won? Sparta won. The established dominant power won. Athens, the rising challenger, lost. Their fleet was destroyed, their empire collapsed, their democracy was overthrown. So, if China is supposed to be the Athens of the 21st century, then the actual lesson of the Thucydides story is that China should expect to lose, not that America should accommodate China. Okay? The logic cuts the other way entirely.
And there's another problem with this whole debate, which is even more fundamental. And this is what I really want to emphasize. The Thucydides trap asks, "Will these two powers go to war with each other?" But that is not the most dangerous scenario facing the world right now. The most dangerous scenario is not a war between America and China. The most dangerous scenario is that neither America nor China is willing to maintain the global order that everyone depends on. And that is a completely different problem, and it has a different name. It is called the Kindleberger trap. Okay?
Charles Kindleberger was an American economic historian, and his key insight was this. The Great Depression of 1929 did not happen because there was no money. It happened because there was no leadership. Britain, which had been the dominant global power for a century, was exhausted after the First World War, and could no longer afford to maintain the global trading system. And America, which was rising rapidly, was not yet ready or willing to take on that responsibility. And in that gap, that vacuum of leadership, the whole system broke down. So, the Kindleberger trap says, the world falls apart not because powerful nations go to war with each other, but because no powerful nation is willing to pay the cost of maintaining the global commons, the shipping lanes, the trading rules, the security guarantees that everyone depends on.
Now, look at the world today, and I mean really look at it. Not the headlines, the structure. America under the current administration has been very clear. America first. No more subsidizing the security of other countries. No more absorbing the cost of maintaining a global system from which others benefit more than Americans do. The posture has shifted from being the world's policeman to being a transactional actor that uses its power for its own concrete interest. And China, China is expanding its influence, yes. China is building infrastructure, yes. China is creating economic dependencies around the world, but China is not stepping up as a responsible guarantor of the global commons. China is not enforcing freedom of navigation. China is not providing the public goods that a leading global power is supposed to provide. So, you have America stepping back and China not stepping forward. And what fills that vacuum?
Look at what the analysts are documenting. Analysts studying the Indo-Pacific and the Baltic have noted an unprecedented increase in physical attacks on undersea cables, the cables that carry the world's internet traffic and financial transactions using commercial vessels and dual-use technology, allowing attackers to deny responsibility. And because neither America nor China is willing to investigate, attribute, and enforce consequences, nothing happens. The attacks continue.
And then there is this one geopolitical risk analyst named Marco Vincenzo commenting on the current situation in the Strait of Hormuz, said something that I think captures the Kindelberger trap perfectly. He said, "We are shifting from a state of closure to a state of conditional access." He said there will be no return to safe, predictable routes. And this is the key phrase. He said, "All we have is crisis management, but not crisis resolution. Conditional access, crisis management without resolution." That is the Kindelberger trap in practice. The global commons are not being destroyed. They're being privatized. They're being controlled by regional actors who set their own terms, their own fees, their own conditions. And the result is a world that is more unstable, more unpredictable, and more expensive for everyone, especially for the nations that are not powerful enough to set their own terms. 28 ships crossed Hormuz today with Iranian permits. That is conditional access. That is the Kindelberger trap. Okay?
All right? Now, I want to talk about Iran specifically because I think the chess metaphor that has been used by some analysts is actually very apartment, and it reveals something important about why we are in the situation we are in today. Chess, by the way, has Persian roots. The word checkmate comes from the Persian shah mat, which means the king is dead. And there is a piece of analysis circulating right now, and I find it very compelling, that describes this entire conflict as a chess game in which Iran has been playing at the level of a grandmaster, while America has been playing like a novice. Let me explain why.
America's military doctrine in this conflict has relied on what they call shock and awe. The idea is you strike decisively, you decapitate the leadership, and the enemy collapses. In the very first hours of the war, the Israelis and Americans launched a strike against Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran. He died. State media eventually confirmed it, saying he had chosen to stay in Tehran and die for his people rather than flee to Moscow. His daughter, his son-in-law, his grandchildren, much of his family died in this strike. By conventional military logic, this should have been decisive. You cut off the head, the body falls. But Iran had anticipated this. Iran had spent decades preparing for exactly this scenario. And what they built, what they call their mosaic defense, is specifically designed to function without centralized command. 31 provinces, 31 independent cells, each with its own strategy, its own orders, its own weapons, its own chain of command. When you kill the leadership, nothing stops. The system was designed as a dead man's switch. The orders were already given. The missiles were already programmed. The drones were already deployed. Okay?
And then there is the economic dimension of this war, which I think is extraordinary. And I want to give you specific numbers, because I think numbers are important here. The Shahed drones that Iran is using cost at most $50,000 each. Some estimates say as little as 35,000. And Iran is producing approximately 500 of them per day. They have an estimated stockpile of 80,000 units. Now, to shoot down one of these drones, the United States uses its Patriot and THAAD missile defense systems. Each interceptor missile costs approximately $1 million. And you often need two or three shots to bring down a drone. So, you're spending somewhere between two and three million dollars to destroy a $50,000 piece of equipment.
And then consider this, the US Navy has been boasting about air superiority over Iran. But when you look at what actually happened, and this has been documented, American forces bombed civilian ships in Iranian ports And then claimed they had destroyed Iran's navy. But what they had actually destroyed was largely above ground infrastructure. Iran's real military capacity, its ballistic missiles, its deep underground bunkers, its nuclear installations, was barely touched. One analyst described it bluntly. The US bombed civilian ships in Iranian ports and then claimed it had destroyed Iran's navy, which in fact it had scarcely touched.
Meanwhile, Iran's counter strategy has been working on multiple levels simultaneously. Their drone and missile attacks drove US aircraft carriers and destroyers back from the Iranian coast. They struck American bases throughout the Gulf, bases that the Pentagon has since described, in their own words, as nearly uninhabitable. American soldiers have had to be relocated to hotels. And then, and this is almost too extraordinary to believe, Iran tracked the soldiers to those hotels and attacked the hotels.
And then there is the water dimension. This is something almost nobody in the Western media is discussing. The Gulf states, the GCC, have almost no fresh water. They depend on desalination plants for 60% of their water supply. Iran has the ability to destroy those desalination plants with drones. A drone costing $50,000 can knock out a desalination plant that serves millions of people. Can those plants be defended? The same air defense systems that have been shown to fail against drone swarms in Iran and Israel. No. So you have Iran in a mountain fortress surrounded by mountains that hide its missile bases and drone facilities, able to strike at will against a flat desert environment where everything, the oil fields, the ports, the hotels where American soldiers are hiding, the desalination plants, the refineries, is exposed and indefensible.
And on top of all this, Iran just unveiled at a ceremony in Tehran's Inqilab Square on May 31st a new naval attack vessel called the 27 Rajab. It can reach speeds of 100 knots. 100 knots, that is 185 km/h, and it is equipped to launch long-range cruise missiles. Iran called it a new symbol of Iran's maritime military capabilities. They unveiled it on the same day they were issuing permits for ships to cross Hormuz. That is not a country that is losing this war, okay?
And then there is this strait itself. Iran has established what is essentially a maritime authority for the Strait of Hormuz. According to reporting, a draft of the so-called Elastimo Bod agreement, which was leaked on Iranian state television, would give Tehran the authority to determine the nature of vessels passing through the strait, collect navigation service fees, require ships to provide cargo information, and conduct fiscal inspections of any vessel they consider potentially hostile. That is not a blockade. That is an administration. Iran is not closing Hormuz. Iran is managing Hormuz. And that distinction between closing and managing is actually more dangerous for the long-term global order because it normalizes Iranian control. It makes it a fact on the ground. It makes it the new baseline. Marco Vincenzo put it precisely, we are not going to restore long-term confidence. Temporary calm is not the same as strategic stability. And the people who think a ceasefire agreement will return the world to the way it was before this war began are going to be very disappointed. Okay?
Now, I want to talk about two acronyms that are being used by international analysts to describe American policy in this war. I know they sound informal, but I think they actually describe something structurally important. And every data point I am about to give you is documented. Taco. Trump always chickens out. Nacho. Not a chance Hormuz opens. Let me walk you through the evidence for each.
For Taco, when Trump launched this war, the stated objectives were maximalist. Regime change in Iran, unconditional surrender, complete dismantlement of Iran's nuclear program and its ballistic missile capabilities. That was the goal. And what are we now negotiating? A 60-day memorandum of understanding in exchange for some language still being argued over about Iran's enriched uranium stockpile and some discussion about the conditions for reopening the Strait of Hormuz. One former foreign policy expert, Robert Kagan, has stated plainly, "Trump's outcome is surrender." And conservative hawks, sitting Republican senators, including Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, and Roger Wicker, along with former CIA Director Mike Pompeo, are publicly criticizing Trump for pursuing a peace deal at all. They are calling this new agreement a repeat of the JCPOA, the Obama-era nuclear deal that Trump himself called the worst deal in American history when he tore it up in 2018. So, Trump's own political allies are accusing him of doing exactly what he accused Obama of doing. That is Taco.
Now, here is the specific evidence from today, from the last 24 hours. Trump met with his advisers in the Situation Room on May 29th. Axios reported that Trump actually requested several amendments to the deal his envoys had already negotiated. More specific language about the uranium stockpile, how and when it would be transferred or destroyed, and revised language around Hormuz control. He sent his team back to negotiate these amendments. According to a senior administration official, quote, "At the turn of the week, we hope to have something. Meanwhile, the Iranian side has said clearly the deal is not yet finalized. Work is still ongoing, and three major sticking points remain." What are those sticking points? First, Iran wants its frozen assets. We are talking about 12 billion dollars released immediately upon any announcement of a deal. America insists the process must be gradual and performance-based. Second, Iran has been seeking financial compensation for the damage done by America and Israel. The language is now shifted to a construction fund worth approximately 300 billion dollars. America has shown no commitment to this whatsoever. Third, Iran wants sanctions removed at least on its oil and petrochemical sector while negotiations are still ongoing. Again, America has made no commitment. These are not small gaps. These are fundamental disagreements about money, sovereignty, and verification. And while both sides are talking, the guns have not stopped. Today, the IRGC announced it had shot down a US MQ-1 drone that had entered Iranian territorial waters. The IRGC statement was direct. It was immediately detected and targeted by the Revolutionary Guards modern defense missiles and shot down. And then, any aggression will be dealt with decisively. That is taco. Maximum goals, shrinking outcomes, constant threats that are not followed through, and Iran continuing to do exactly what it was doing before the war started.
Now, nacho. Not a chance Hormuz opens. Here is what the Pentagon has actually done in its effort to enforce the naval blockade. American forces fired a Hellfire missile directly into the engine room of a commercial vessel, the M/V Lion Star, flying a Gambian flag in the Gulf of Oman. This ship had ignored more than 20 warnings from the United States and was attempting to reach an Iranian port in violation of the blockade. The Hellfire missile disabled the ship completely. According to CENTCOM, the United States has now disabled a total of five commercial vessels and forced 116 others to change course.
At the same time, and this is remarkable, American forces have been quietly helping other commercial vessels turn off their navigation systems and slip through the Strait of Hormuz undetected to avoid Iranian controls. And some reporting reveals that America has been quietly allowing certain Qatari oil tankers to cross the strait even after those tankers paid Iranian navigation fees. So, on one hand, America is firing Hellfire missiles at ships that violate the blockade. On the other hand, America is helping some ships evade Iranian controls through the back door. And some ships are just paying Iran's fees and crossing with American knowledge. This is not a coherent blockade strategy. This is improvisation under pressure. This is the behavior of a power that does not have full control of the situation and is trying to manage competing pressures, maintaining the appearance of strength while quietly accommodating the reality that it cannot simply force Hormuz open. Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, was in Singapore when he said he was confident a deal would be reached. But, he also said the naval blockade remains in place. And the military posture remains, quote, "stronger than ever." Stronger than ever while Iran is issuing permits for 28 ships per day. Okay?
And then there is the domestic dimension because taco and nacho are not just about the international situation. They're also about what is happening inside America. And I think this is critical for understanding the structural fragility of America's position. The cost of this war so far, $72 billion. That is approximately $1.2 billion per day. And critically, that is three times the official Pentagon estimate. The Pentagon has now requested an additional $200 billion in supplemental funding. 15 American soldiers have been killed. More than 500 have been wounded. Damage to American bases in the Gulf region has been estimated at $800 million. Many of these bases are, in the Pentagon's own words, nearly uninhabitable.
Spirit Airlines has gone bankrupt because jet fuel costs have exploded due to the energy disruption from the closed strait. There is a serious shortage of fertilizer because sulfur, which is critical for fertilizer production, has risen in price by 57%. Jet fuel is up 52%. These are not abstract statistics. These feed directly into food prices, transportation costs, and the basic economic conditions of ordinary American families. And the public knows it. Polls show that the majority of Americans, particularly Democrats and Independents, oppose this war. But even among Trump's own supporters, 53% of voters who voted for Trump oppose American military involvement in the conflict between Israel and Iran. This has fed into actual social movements, the People's March, No Kings, Economic Blackout, and what has been called the 2026 United States General Strike. These are real mass mobilizations of Americans against this war, and they are happening while Trump's approval rating sits at 37%.
And then there was the moment, and I find this extraordinary, when Trump posted on Truth Social that a civilization would die tonight if Iran did not concede. This triggered immediate concern that Trump was threatening nuclear war. Congressional Democrats called for invoking the 25th Amendment. Conservative commentators called the statement reckless. And meanwhile, the White House was producing propaganda videos about the war using footage from video games and Hollywood films, which led to a separate backlash accusing administration of turning destruction and suffering into an entertainment spectacle. And to top all of this, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission threatened to revoke the broadcasting licenses of television stations that ran what the administration considered negative coverage of the war. Congressional Democrats immediately called this dictatorial and an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment. That is the domestic picture. That is what is happening inside the country that is supposed to be enforcing the global order. Okay?
Now, I want to be fair. I always want to present the strongest possible version of the argument against my own position. And I genuinely think there is a serious counter argument here. The steel man goes like this. America's still the most powerful military force on Earth. The United States Navy still controls the world's oceans in a way that no other navy can match. America still has allies. America still has the world's largest economy. And the fact that negotiations are ongoing, that both sides are talking rather than just fighting, is actually evidence that the system is working. A deal may yet be reached. And if a deal is reached, that would validate America's course of strategy, not undermine it. And I want to acknowledge this argument has real merit. I do not dismiss it.
But here is what the steel man cannot account for. First, consider the military dimension, Iran's nuclear program. According to intelligence assessments that are now circulating, was set back by only one to two years by the strikes. And critically, and this is the key point, most of Iran's stockpile of highly enriched uranium is stored deep underground and is safe. The strikes were described as achieving air superiority because many attacks were launched from beyond Iran's borders. But the actual military capacity that Iran could use to retaliate, the deep underground missile bases, the dispersed drone facilities, the hardened nuclear installations, was barely touched.
Second, consider the alliance dimension. America's allies are not supporting this war. Spain closed its airspace to American military aircraft. France refused to allow Israel to use French airspace for transporting American military supplies. Italy shut down landing rights for American military aircraft at the Sigonella base. Saudi Arabia, America's most important Gulf partner, refused to allow American forces to use the Prince Sultan airbase, refused to open Saudi airspace for strikes against Iran, and forced Trump to suspend certain operations. When you call on your allies to escort ships to a dangerous waterway, and every single one of them refuses, NATO, China, Russia, all of them declining, that is not a coalition of strength. That is an isolated actor conducting a unilateral operation and calling it a coalition.
Third, and this is the strategic dimension that I think matters most, the strategic overstretch is already happening, and it is measurable. The delivery of 400 Tomahawk cruise missiles to Japan has been delayed by 2 years until 2030 because the stockpile has been depleted in this conflict. Arms sales to Taiwan have been suspended. The military resources that were positioned to deter China in the Indo-Pacific are being consumed right now in a war against $50,000 drones over the Persian Gulf. This is what Thucydides actually warned about, not that great powers go to war with each other. He warned about hubris, about the arrogance of overreach. Athens launched its expedition to Sicily, far from home, against a well-defended opponent in a theater where it had no real strategic necessity because its leaders were convinced of their own invincibility, and that expedition destroyed the Athenian empire. America launched this war against a country that has been preparing for asymmetric resistance for 45 years, a country that has hardened its military capacity against exactly the kind of strikes America knows how to deliver, and the result is not a quick victory. The result is a grinding conflict that is draining resources, alienating allies, destabilizing the global economy, and generating massive domestic opposition. That is not a counter-argument to the steel man. That is a steel man's own evidence working against it. Okay?
Let me now pull all of this together into one coherent picture. Because I think the real insight is how everything connects. Xi Jinping invokes the Thucydides trap. The world starts debating, will America and China go to war? And the answer so far is no. Both sides are being careful. The Beijing summit happened. There was diplomacy. Xi and Trump met. Good. That is the right outcome for that specific danger. But while everyone has been focused on managing the US-China rivalry to avoid the Thucydides trap, the Kindleberger trap has been developing unchecked. America is not willing to absorb the full cost of maintaining global order. China is not willing to step up as a responsible global hegemon. And in that vacuum, regional actors, primarily Iran in the Persian Gulf, have moved to establish control over the commons. Iran is now the de facto administrator of the world's most important maritime choke point. They're issuing permits. They're collecting fees. They're drafting what amounts to a regulatory framework for who can use the strait and on what terms. According to the leaked draft of the Islamabad agreement, Iran would have the right to determine the nature of vessels, collect fees, demand cargo information, and conduct physical inspections. This is not a temporary disruption. This is a structural shift.
And the cost of this shift is already being paid by everyone. The Japanese economy faces collapse if the strait stays closed. The prime minister has said as much. Europe, which is already cut off from Russian energy, depends on Gulf supplies for survival. India, Pakistan, South Korea, all deeply affected. And the GCC states themselves, which have no food and almost no fresh water that does not come through desalination, are extraordinarily vulnerable to exactly the kind of attacks Iran has shown it can deliver.
One serious scholar who has been writing about these dynamics compared this moment to the period after Rome's victory over Carthage in the Punic Wars. Rome achieved total dominance, and then from that position of apparent invincibility, the internal contradictions began to consume the system from within. The democratic institutions of the Republic were hollowed out. The military-industrial complex gained disproportionate power. The empire kept expanding not because expansion was strategically necessary, but because the internal dynamics of a declining system require constant victories to maintain legitimacy. I am not saying America is Rome in that sense exactly, but the structural parallel is worth sitting with. Okay?
Let me end with something concrete because I think predictions matter. They force you to be accountable. First prediction, the uranium question will determine whether a deal is actually signed. Trump has asked for very specific language about how and when Iran's enriched uranium stockpile will be transferred or destroyed. Iran has not agreed to this. And this is not a small detail. This is the entire rationale for the war, stopping Iran from having a nuclear weapon. If the deal does not include a verifiable, time-bound, and forcible mechanism for dealing with that uranium stockpile, then whatever is signed is not a real deal. It is a pause, a breathing space, and the clock on Iran's nuclear program continues running during that pause. Watch very carefully for what the final text says about uranium, not what politicians claim it says, but what the actual verified language says.
Second prediction, the Strait will not return to free navigation even with a ceasefire. Marco Vincenzo said it clearly, there will be no return to safe, predictable routes. Even if both sides sign something and call it a peace agreement, the conditions for movement through Hormuz will now be different. Iran has established facts on the ground. 28 ships crossed with Iranian permits today. That number will continue. The Iranian system of permits and fees will continue to function as a baseline. The question is whether the world formally accepts this as the new normal or whether it pretends a ceasefire means a return to the old normal. Watch the behavior of shipping companies and insurance underwriters. They operate on actual risk calculations, not political announcements. If they continue to price in Iranian authority over Hormuz, then the Kindleberger trap has become permanent.
Third prediction, the domestic pressure inside America will intensify regardless of what happens with the deal. $72 billion spent, $200 billion more requested, 15 are dead, 500 wounded, Spirit Airlines bankrupt, fertilizer shortage threatening food prices. 53% of Trump's own voters oppose this. The people's march, no kings, economic blackout, the 2026 general strike, these are not going away. Whether Trump signs a deal or continues the conflict, the domestic political cost of this war has already been incurred. And the Republican hawks who are calling his peace deal a surrender, Graham, Cruz, Wicker, Pompeo, are going to make his political position untenable regardless of what he does next. This is elite overproduction in action. The internal factions within the American elite are consuming each other. And that process will continue to weaken America's capacity to project coherent foreign policy regardless of what happens at the negotiating table. Okay?
Your homework, read the full text of the Axis report on Trump's amendments request. Pay attention to what he is trying to change in the uranium language and the Hormuz language, compare it to what Iran has said its preconditions are. The gap between these two positions will tell you more about whether a deal is possible than any press conference will. Read the Marco Vincenzo analysis on conditional access versus strategic stability. Understand that distinction deeply. Because that distinction is the difference between the Thucydides trap and the Kindleberger trap. One is about war, the other is about slow institutional decay. And slow institutional decay is much harder to see and much harder to stop. And then look at a map of the Strait of Hormuz. Just look at the geography, the mountains of Iran on one side, the flat desert of the GCC on the other. The strait is 33 km wide. You can almost swim across it. And 20% of the world's oil and liquefied natural gas moves through that gap. Look at that map and then ask yourself who actually has geographic and strategic control of that passage. And then ask, what does it mean that the country with that geographic and strategic control is now issuing permits and collecting fees, okay?
Here is the question I want to leave with you. The Thucydides trap asks, will a rising power and established power go to war? The Kindleberger trap asks something completely different. It asks, what happens to the world when no power is willing to maintain it? And what we are watching right now with Iran issuing permits for Hormuz, with America firing Hellfire missiles into ship engines while secretly helping other ships pay Iranian fees, with Saudi Arabia refusing its own ally access to military bases, with 53% of Trump voters opposing their own president's war, with 28 ships crossing a world critical choke point under Iranian authority today, what we are watching is not a war between great powers. What we are watching is the global order becoming conditional, becoming contingent, becoming subject to local authority rather than universal rules. And the question that none of us can answer yet because the answer is still being written is this, when the global commons are administered by whoever is strong enough to administer them in any given region, what does that world look like for everyone else? For the countries that are too small to set their own terms. For the 200 million people whose livelihoods depend on seas that nobody is protecting. For the next generation, which will inherit this world and have to figure out how to live in it, I do not know the answer. I genuinely do not know. And I think anyone who tells you they do know is not being honest with you. What I do know is that the decisions being made right now in Washington, in Tehran, in Beijing, in Islamabad, in Riyadh are shaping the answer. And understanding what is really happening, not the surface headlines, but the structural dynamics, is the first step toward being able to think clearly about it. That is what I try to do in this class. And that is why I keep coming back to it. Okay? Thank you for being here.