Transcription
We have to assume that the Americans under Trump were planning for a short decisive war to control, uh, Iran. And once you control Iran, you control the entire Strait of Hormuz. You control all the resources. You can control global trade, right?
Also, what's really important is you prevent a Russia, Iran, China alliance from forming. Okay? Because once that happens, once China, Russia, and Iran come together and trade and create this trading block, it achieves the heartland, right? And then Europe comes in, then the Middle East comes in, then Africa comes in, food breaks.
So from an economic perspective, Americans didn't have a choice in the matter in that the US dollar was extremely unstable. It, it, people didn't have any faith in it anymore. And so you have to, you had to use force to, um, remind people that the US dollar is still the only global reserve currency. And so they went into Iran hoping to control that crucial choke point of resources in trade. It's really blown up in their faces.
Okay. So you've put a couple pieces together that I think are really important, and I'm going to say it in a slightly different way and see if this lands for you. So, uh, 1971, Nixon breaks the, um, peg to gold. You become a true fiat currency. There's now no, um, real tether for you. The world begins to realize, okay, hold on a second. This is just fiat. You guys are going to print out of control like every empire before you. Uh, and so Nixon does this brilliant thing and he finds two avenues to keep making the dollar, um, systemically important. He gets essentially the vast majority of oil trade to be only transacted in dollars, presumably. You didn't say this, but I think it's basically, we'll protect you, dear GCC countries. So, you can't really protect yourself. Super exposed there in the desert. Don't worry, we've got you. You guys focus on infrastructure, desalinization, all that stuff. Uh, and we'll run your military for you. That works out very well. Hey, China, we need cheap labor, but hey, we'll make sure that we're buying a lot of the stuff that you're producing. Just make sure that you're also doing trade in dollars. So you've got energy now pegged to dollars, and you've got this industrial revolution, not the one that most people think of when they hear that, but this new rise of China as the world's manufacturer, also now being tied to dollars.
Then, because of course, as empires do, uh, they overextend, they bully, they do things that ultimately are against their own interests, and we begin eroding the trust in the dollar, which is the only thing left on a fiat currency. And so the part that I want to reward is when you say that we use our military to remind people of the power of the dollar or that we're strong or whatever. I would say it slightly differently, and this gets to why Iran becomes so important. Like, what actually happens in Iran? It isn't enough to remind everybody that you have a big military. You actually have to get control of Iran. You have to control the oil. Now you have to control the Strait of Hormuz. And if you either are forced to destroy the oil, which now is going to just have a massive negative impact on the global economy, or because of asymmetric warfare, Iran continues to cause a problem in the Strait of Hormuz, and it's technically open, but every time a US or US allied ship tries to go through, it gets blown up. Now all of a sudden, you may have reminded everybody that you have the stronger military, but Iran is showing you they can still control the thing you must get control of if you want to win.
Okay. Um, I would disagree because you are saying that the Americans went in hoping for a Venezuela solution, right? Where they, uh, removed Maduro and Desert Rodriguez, the vice president was very happy to play along. So it's basically a regime change that favored the Americans. So let's just discuss how the interests of Israel and the interests of Trump are different. Right? Because, as, as you point out, Trump is interested in optics. He wants a quick victory. He wants, um, uh, the Iranians to, uh, surrender to him, and he wants to be able to control the oil supply so that when he goes to Beijing, um, at the end of this month, um, he can negotiate a great deal for America, and he will, and he will look really, really, uh, good, right? Because he just came off of a, uh, a very decisive victory in Venezuela. So, you know, he was very, again, he's very confident. That's Trump. But I think the Israelis are thinking much more long-term, and they really want to eliminate, um, uh, Iran as a threat, um, in the Middle East. And this is not the Israelis as well. If you look at Saudi Arabia, uh, the Saudis have always had issues with Iranians. So I think it was a coalition of interests, um, the Israelis and and the Saudis who were pushing Trump to attack Iran. And actually, reporting from, uh, the Washington Post actually confirms this, where MBS, the head of Saudi Arabia, he was lobbying hard for Trump to attack the Iranians.
The thing that I want to understand better is, given the quagmire that we are now in with Iran, what are the options that are on the table, especially for Trump? So if you agree that for the US to actually have gained ground here, they need to control the Strait of Hormuz or by some miracle, uh, get a friendly government in Iran that will, um, maintain control but do things that are very beneficial to the GCC countries, to the US, to Israel, um, which seem sort of farther away by the day. But, um, if he has to do that, do you think he's going to push into, uh, Qeshm Island and take over? It's like 94%. Do you think he goes all the way to a ground invasion? Um, what do you think are the options at this point, given the realities on the ground?
So what I've observed is that Trump and America, um, they're behaving exactly the way that an empire in decline behaves, which is that they suffer from a toxic and lethal combination of both hubris and desperation. Um, meaning that they continue to underestimate the resilience and resolve of the Iranians, and they are desperate for a knockout punch as quickly as possible. Trump wants this war to end as soon as possible because he knows that the longer this war drags on, the worse the economy will suffer, the worse his polling will be, and the more likely the stock market will will tank. So he's looking for a knockout punch. And right now, um, if you're looking for a quick solution, if you're looking for a gamble, well, your best option is, uh, Qeshm Island because, as you point out, that is where, uh, Iran exports 90% of its oil, primarily to China. So right now, a Marine Expeditionary Force is traveling from Japan, uh, to the Middle East, and, and we should expect them to arrive maybe in about a week. And there's there's about 200 of them, and they specialize in amphibious landing. So the idea is that they will bombard, um, the coastline in Qeshm Island, and this will enable, um, the Marines to land and secure the oil deposits of Qeshm Island. And at this point, Trump will declare victory and try to get the Iranians to the negotiating table and say, "Listen, I have Qeshm Island, and this is your economic lifeline. So let's cut a deal that allows us to, uh, both save face." Okay. And I think that is the plan. But there are a lot of issues with this plan. Okay. Um, the first issue is that Qeshm Island is not as important economically as people believe. Um, that's the first issue. Meaning that even if you were to secure Qeshm Island, Iran does have workarounds where they can just ship from, um, from the coast. That's issue number one. Issue number two is that, um, Iran needs financing for this war, and now they're using this oil as financing, as collateral financing. But if the Chinese and the Russians believe that the Americans want to strangle Iran, then it's not in their best interest to see Iran destroyed, then they're going to provide financing anyway. And look, the reality is that now that oil is shooting up in price, this benefits Russia tremendously, right? So Putin can take all this oil riches and finance Iran, um, in fighting this war because Russia has the most to lose if Iran loses this war and there's regime change. So that's issue number two.
You think Russia has more to lose than China?
I, I do. I do. Um, and the reason why is that if Iran were to fall, this opens up the Russian southern flank to the Americans, right? Because, uh, Azerbaijan is an Israeli-American ally, and, um, if Iran were to fall, then, um, the Americans and Israelis could could stage operations, uh, from the south. Also, um, also Iran has been providing a lot of support to, uh, Russia in the Ukraine war. So Russia is getting most of its drones from Iran. So, um, uh, Foreign Minister, uh, Sergey Lavrov has said that, uh, Russia will protect Iran, and Russia is most interested in, um, the Iranian government staying intact. And there's been reporting from American news outlets that American intelligence believes that Russia's providing targeting for the Iranians. So, uh, all these drone strikes, all these ballistic missile strikes, it's, they're getting intelligence and targeting from the Russians, which, by the way, is what NATO did in Ukraine, right? So from the Russian perspective, it's payback. So the Russians are heavily invested in, um, in the Iranians winning this war. The Chinese are pragmatic. They don't, they really don't care. They see Iran more as a major supplier of oil that they that they need. But if they need to shift, um, uh, supply routes, they, they can, they can do so, right? So the Russians are heavily, um, uh, invested, um, and so they will finance, uh, the Iranians regardless if Iran is no longer able to export oil. Okay. Uh, and another issue is this. If you attack the economic lifeline of Iran, they now have incentive to strike at the oil refineries of the GCC. Right? Because no matter how much economic damage you can do to Iran, they can do so much more to the GCC. Um, and this would cause the oil, the price of oil to spike. Remember, Iranians have said that their goal is to, uh, spike the price of oil to $200 a barrel. Now, it's about $100 a barrel. And so, what they're saying is that we're going to fight a very long war of attrition that could last years. Um, so, so I, I don't see what the strategic benefit of taking Qeshm Island is. And the last problem, and this is the most important, is that, um, once you take Qeshm Island, you expose the Marines to drone strikes and artillery strikes from the coast, which means that you now need to send in more Marines to secure the coast. Right? So you sent in 2,000, 3,000 troops to secure Qeshm Island. You've done that easily. Um, but they can't secure, they can't secure the island against, uh, Iranian drones. So the only way you can do that is by taking, taking the coastline along Qeshm Island. You do that with tens of thousands of, uh, Marines. But then you, you expose, um, these Marines to attacks from the mountains, the Zagros Mountains, right? These drones, these missiles from the Zagros Mountains, which means that now you have to invest 100,000 troops to go after Iran's, um, underground missile facilities. And this is exactly what happened in, uh, Vietnam. The great irony of all this is that the, um, Marine Expeditionary Force that is going to, um, Iran is the same force that went into Vietnam and marked the, um, the first major ground involvement of the Americans in about 1965. They basically went into Da Nang and secured the Air Force base. And at first, it was like 3,500 soldiers, and that that was supposed to be it. Like five years later, you're at 500,000 American soldiers, right? So once you send in ground troops, then it creates a logic, a momentum of its own, and then you have mission creep, and then some costly, um, and then eventually you have a national draft, okay? So that is a great danger of taking Qeshm Island at this point.
Okay, so let's, um, keep pushing down that road because I think that, uh, you're bang on with this. I think if Trump puts boots on the ground in Iran, I think he can get away with Qeshm Island because it will be small. It will feel like, hey, we're doing this very discreet thing. We can take it in, you know, a couple days. We've got it now. He'll declare that that's a big win for us. We control 94%. He buys himself a little bit of time. Most people don't know what you just said, which is Iran has other options. So that's going to feel, going back to Trump equals optics. Uh, it's going to feel like an optical win. The thing that scares me is I think to your point, he will end up getting drawn into boots on the ground because one, he'll have seen, oh, the American people didn't super freak out. Okay, that's great. We all start going, well, I mean, I guess we already have boots on the ground, so it's not so crazy that we go, like, just try to finish the job real quick. You know, I, but by doing that, I think that his base implodes. I think he is a guaranteed loss at the midterms, and I think given the political dynamic in the US where we are so hyperpolarized, that it becomes existential for him in terms of he will go to prison. So if he loses the midterms, he gets impeached immediately. He then obviously loses power in, uh, 2028, which needs to happen no matter what, given that right now our constitution makes very clear, no third term for you. But I think that we would, I mean, look, many, many a thing can happen between now and the 2028 elections. But I would imagine if Trump goes down, the Republican party loses power, Democrats get into office, they have already vowed that they're going to go after him legally. So I have a feeling he's going to fight like this is existential. So he's going to start making decisions that would seem rational to anybody or irrational to anybody else will seem rational to him because he absolutely must find a way to victory, better to prolong it, leverage a war to stay in power, etc., etc. Um, so walk me through if you think any of that analysis is off base or if I'm missing something. Um, but what do you see if he makes the fateful decision to go after Qeshm Island?
Yeah. No, I, I agree with your analysis. I think a lot of his thinking is how does he stay in power? Because we know exactly what's going to happen if he leaves office. The Democrats are going to come to power, and they're going to go after, uh, him and his family. We know this because that's what happened in, uh, 2020 when, when remember the raid in Mar-a-Lago? Remember all these, uh, law, all this lawfare against Trump? Remember that he lost his court case and almost bankrupted him. Okay. So you can imagine that there's going to be a lot of people who want revenge for what Trump is doing in his second term. So Trump cannot afford to leave office, and so his personal calculus is, how do I stay in power? Well, staying in power for the ballot, ballot box is, you know, very risky. But, you know, if he starts a war, and this war is at first supported by both the Democrats and the Republicans, but then, um, slowly this war spirals out of control, and then, um, there's a lot of unrest around America, in which case he's forced to send the National Guard, um, and then he's forced to call the national draft in order to protect American interests in the Middle East, then he can conceivably stay in power, uh, for as long as this war continues.