@FinanceLancelot Well, itâs time to read again Steinbeck and his masterpiece « Grapes of wrath » if the MAGAs read it, but I doubt ... The future is going to be very bleak for this so-called Golden Age, leading the world to its doom once again #TrumpWarCriminal#StopwarOnİran
Throughout the course of the Iran War, the United States has made a plethora of unforced errors. Military, strategic, economic... but perhaps the most disastrous? Self-inflicted wounds from the unnecessary rhetoric of Donald Trump.
And yes, I'm serious when I say that COULD be more significant than anything else.
Here's why:
One of the core goals, and no I don't care to argue, of the war was accomplishing complete and total regime change in Iran. It wasn't nuclear weapons. It wasn't their ballistic missile program. And it sure as HELL wasn't their Air Force.
No. At the end of the day, the ultimate strategic objective was regime change.
And I think, at the very start of the war, the Trump Administration though this could be Venezuela 2.0. Kill the Ayatollah, let them collapse, and select a shiny new puppet leader.
Obviously.... well, that backfired.
But that's okay! We HAD other options. And the primary option to still achieve regime change ran through the Iranian people. The average, everyday Iranian.
Just in January, we saw massive protests throughout Iran. Discontent for the current leadership was through the roof.
... And then the United States bombed an elementary school in Minab. Slaughtered 150 CHILDREN. It's quite possible that this on its own ensured the Iranian people would not take the side of the United States and rise up.
But any hope that still remained? Any hope the Iranian people would, as President Trump put it, "take back their country"? That was destroyed by one man: Donald J Trump.
Time after time, President Trump has said that worst possible thing to keep the Iranian people on our side.
Notoriously, and abhorrently, on April 7th he threated to "wipe out their entire civilization" in a Truth Social post. Now, I don't know if you are aware... but the Persian people? Yeah. They're a pretty damn proud group.
Then, just in the past week, President Trump made two other disastrous statements.
On June 1st, DJT went on bizarrely went on Truth Social and said that he had a "very good call with Hezbollah". I'm sorry, what was that? The President of the United States, the one who claimed to be "doing this for the Iranian people"... he just publicly bowed at the feet of a terror organization?
And now, just in the last few hours, Donald Trump claimed that he'd be "honored" to meet the Ayatollah. He said that "in some circles he has a very good reputation".
"I think they have a lot of respect for him."
If there was a glimmer of hope that the Iranian people had not been entirely disenchanted with the United States before today? Yeah. That's gone. The ship has sailed.
Any chance of mass uprisings? Gone.
Any chance of toppling the regime? Gone.
Any chance the regime makes concessions out of fear? Gone.
While the United States has had no shortfall of missteps throughout the War in Iran, perhaps the single most damning, but certainly the most unforced, have been the forced disenchantment of the Iranian people due to foolish and stupid statements from the President of the United States.
Donald. J. Trump.
âIntelligence is not a property of the individual brain. Intelligence is a property of the network the brain is connected toâŠ.
The implication for any individual is direct... If you are smart and isolated, you will be outproduced by people half as smart who are connected.â
A British biologist looked at 200,000 years of human history and found that the entire reason humans broke out of poverty was not intelligence, not language, not even agriculture, but one mechanism so simple a 6-year-old could explain it.
His name is Matt Ridley.
He is a zoologist by training, an evolutionary biologist by career, and in 2010 he wrote a book called The Rational Optimist that quietly argued the most important fact about human progress had been hiding in plain sight for the entire history of economics.
Naval Ravikant has been telling people to read everything Ridley has ever written for the last 15 years. The reason is the argument inside this one book.
For 200,000 years, anatomically modern humans walked around with the same brain you have right now. Same skull size. Same neural architecture. Same raw capacity for language, planning, and abstract thought.
For roughly 190,000 of those years, almost nothing happened. Generation after generation lived and died inside the same Stone Age toolkit their great-great-grandparents had used. Then somewhere around 50,000 years ago, the line on the chart of human progress started to tick upward. Then it bent. Then it exploded.
The question Ridley spent years on was the only question that mattered. What changed.
It was not the brain. The brain had been the same for 190,000 years. It was not language, which had existed long before the takeoff. It was not even agriculture, which arrived only 10,000 years ago and was actually preceded by the upward bend, not the cause of it.
What changed was that humans started trading with strangers.
This sounds too small to be the answer. Ridley argues that it is the answer to almost everything. The moment one human exchanged a useful object with another human from a different group, something happened that no other species on earth had ever done.
Two ideas that had developed in isolation came into contact. The flint knapper learned what the spear maker had figured out. The fisherman from the coast learned what the hunter from the forest had figured out. The two pieces of knowledge fused into something neither side could have produced alone.
Ridley calls this ideas having sex. The phrase sounds frivolous and it is meant to. The point is that ideas, like genes, get better when they combine with other ideas from different lineages.
An idea sitting inside one head, no matter how brilliant the head, eventually hits a ceiling. The same idea exposed to ten thousand other ideas does something genes do under sexual reproduction. It mixes. It recombines. It produces offspring nobody planned.
The cleanest proof of this argument is the most uncomfortable case study in the book. Tasmania.
Around 10,000 years ago, rising sea levels cut Tasmania off from mainland Australia. A population of roughly 4,000 humans was now isolated on an island, with no possibility of contact with the rest of humanity. They had the same brains. The same language. The same starting toolkit as their cousins 150 kilometers north. The natural experiment was now running.
What happened next is something no economist or geneticist had ever predicted.
The mainland Australians kept inventing. Boomerangs. Spear-throwers. Fishing nets. Bone needles for sewing fitted clothes. Watercraft with paddles. Their technology compounded slowly across the centuries.
The Tasmanians went the other way. They did not just fail to invent the new tools their cousins were developing. They started losing the tools they already had. Fishing was abandoned within a few thousand years. Bone tools disappeared. Fitted clothing disappeared. They forgot how to make fire from scratch and started carrying lit firebrands from camp to camp instead, relighting their fires from a neighbor's whenever their own went out.
By the time European explorers arrived in the 17th century, the Tasmanians had the simplest toolkit of any human society ever recorded. Their material culture had gone backward for 8,000 years.
The archaeologist Rhys Jones called it a slow strangulation of the mind.
Joseph Henrich at Harvard later proved with formal mathematical models that there was nothing wrong with Tasmanian brains. There was something wrong with their network. A toolkit requires a critical mass of people exchanging skills to maintain itself.
The act of teaching a skill is imperfect. Every generation loses a small percentage of what the last generation knew. If your population is large enough and trading widely enough, those losses get caught and corrected by someone else who still remembers.
If your population shrinks below a certain threshold and stops mixing with outsiders, the small losses compound until entire technologies disappear.
This is the part that should haunt anyone reading this in 2026.
Intelligence is not a property of the individual brain. Intelligence is a property of the network the brain is connected to. A genius in isolation will produce less than a mediocre thinker inside a dense exchange of other mediocre thinkers.
The thing your ancestors needed in order to break out of 190,000 years of stagnation was not better brains. It was better connections between brains they already had.
The implication for any individual is direct and uncomfortable. If you are smart and isolated, you will be outproduced by people half as smart who are connected.
The most successful people in any field are almost never the smartest people in it. They are the ones positioned at the intersection of the most idea flows. They are reading more authors than their competitors. They are talking to more people from more disciplines. They are in the rooms where ideas from different lineages bump into each other.
Ridley ends the book on the line that sounds optimistic but is actually a warning its this "The future will be invented by people who connect ideas, not by people who guard them."
In my opinion, the call to join the Abraham Accords is the US signalling that it is ready to negotiate its long-term exit strategy from the region as it transitions from the MICâs forever-war model in the Middle East toward negotiated terms for the FIC.
This initiates new negotiation cycles with each participating country, allowing the FIC to maximise asset acquisitions, infrastructure influence, capital flows, and long-term revenue agreements as part of the managed transition to a multipolar world, one increasingly negotiated alongside China and regional powers.
Trump gets a useful political narrative and path to his Nobel peace prize and gets to take credit for Chinaâs BRICS & GCC plan.
Long-term followers of mine would have been expecting this signal next.
It doesnât necessarily mean every country joins.
It means a new phase of negotiations begins, similar to how British decolonisation often transitioned from direct imperial control to financial, corporate, and institutional influence through the FIC.
Military influence gradually gives way to financial leverage, equity purchase structures, investment agreements, infrastructure ownership, technology dependency, and sovereign wealth partnerships, on BRICS, GCC & FIC terms.
That is the negotiation phase now beginning.
Saudi Arabia will likely maintain the position it has held for decades: no full normalisation without a two-state solution.
If Saudi Arabia joins after Palestine has been economically integrated into the GCC framework, then the signal of a new regional order has arrived.
And no, Israel will not rule it.
A Saudi-Iran rapprochement without sanctions, normalised through growing Chinese influence, creates a system balancing both the petrodollar and the petroyuan, while the UAE continues to be the regionâs primary financial hub.
Pakistan, Egypt, and Turkey, potentially supported through BRICS-aligned frameworks, become part of the broader regional security architecture.
The Middle East gradually returns to its older identity as West Asia, while the MIC shifts its focus toward Europe and Latin America as the next theatres of strategic war profiteering, with the US remaining the regional hegemon but increasingly operating within a system ultimately controlled by the FIC.
All laying the foundation for a new FIC-, TIC-, and China-influenced AI and robotics-driven global surveillance and policing architecture.
A system where finance, technology, state power, digital identity, CBDCs, AI, predictive surveillance, and autonomous infrastructure increasingly merge into a single transnational control framework.
The nation-state remains as the branding layer, but power gradually shifts toward integrated networks of capital, data, energy, AI, and security coordination.
That is the long-term trajectory in my opinion.
For the government, war is called GDP.
For the military-industrial complex, war is called revenue and profit.
For shareholders, war is called share price growth and dividends.
For the financial-industrial complex, war is called wealth transfer, bonds & yield.
For the technical-industrial complex, war is called innovation, data and beta testing.
For the people, war is called debt and inflation.
For the victims of war, war becomes the trauma and radicalisation used to manufacture the next cycle of strategic tension that justifies even more war.
The goal is never to win.
The goal is to spend as much money as possible.
The more destruction, the more reconstruction contracts.
The more instability, the more debt issuance.
The more chaos, the more resources, infrastructure and trade routes get renegotiated.
Thatâs the business model.
Youâre not defending democracy or saving the people.
Youâre defending the terrorism your governments and intelligence networks helped create, fund, arm & exploit.
And then the fear from that terrorism gets turned back on you.
While you and your children pay the bill.
While the media manufactures consent and distorts reality to cheer it along.
And if you question any of it, they call you the conspiracy theorist, extremist or domestic terrorist.
You are funding terrorism and calling it defending democracy.
And most of you donât even know it.
You called it patriotism.
You are the product.
Get it?
The Atlantic piece by Robert Kagan is interesting not because it proves âAmerica lostâ or âIran wonâ, but because it reveals how seriously parts of the US foreign policy establishment now view the Hormuz problem.
Some of the articleâs strongest points are actually correct IMHO:
First, Hormuz does not need to be fully âclosedâ to create a strategic and economic crisis. A Strait that is selectively dangerous, politically conditioned or commercially unreliable already changes the entire equilibrium. As I explained in a Substack, itâs remarkably simple to stop vessel traffic. A threat is enough.
Second, the key issue is not military maps but commercial confidence. Oil molecules do not teleport through Hormuz because politicians announce a ceasefire. Shipping is a human business run by fleet managers, insurers, charter desks and exhausted seafarers trying to avoid getting trapped in a warzone.
Thatâs why I keep repeating: what matters is not some outbound Iranian or Indian tanker during a ceasefire window. Thatâs only a sign of people trying to escape the Persian trap. Itâs noise.
The signal is whether ballast vessels voluntarily go BACK INTO the Persian trap to restore normal tanker schedules. That is a much higher hurdle. I would certainly not send my vessel in there, not for any kind of premium.
The article is also right that the current restraint by the US and regional actors reflects the enormous escalation risks tied to Gulf energy infrastructure. Markets still underestimate how vulnerable refining, LNG and export systems really are.
But the article overreaches massively.
âCheckmateâ, âAmerican surrenderâ, âIran controls the global energy systemâ, ânobody can reopen Hormuzâ etc. is rhetorical excess masquerading as inevitability.
The current reality is not âcanâtâ, but âwonât yetâ. The US, Israel, Japan/Korea, China, France/Britain (in other EU NATO combo), India or the Gulf states all ultimately possess plenty of latent military capability to destroy a (weak) Iranian military/resistance if political will emerges.
The issue is that nobody wants to pay the political price of full escalation for now, which is entirely rational. A few weeks back this useless & under-resourced conflict wasnât even on the radar. Why rush into a full blown war now? With what political support while diesel & jet fuel remains available? Itâs early.
Likewise, markets have a way to adapt. Painfully, slowly and with enormous friction, but they adapt. By H2 2027 we will see:
- workarounds/bypass infrastructure; convoy systems, new insurance structures;
- bilateral arrangements; altered trade flows; smuggling; new alliances etc;
- and permanently higher geopolitical risk premia for the region (Asians in particular will be fat up with all this the Middle Eastern groundhog day bullshit, rightly so);
Between now and then? A messy muddle-through phase attached to recessionary pressure, with significant pain in Asia & Africa and lesser pain in Europe and the US, huge inventory draws and massive SPR releases, inflation scares and periodic political panic.
Meanwhile, forecasting neat âdealâ outcomes is useless. Nobody knows:
- how stable the Iranian regime really is,
- how its populations react after a prolonged ceasefire and hyperinflation;
- how long Western political tolerance for this nonsense lasts;
- whether Israel escalates further;
- how Saudi/UAE/TUR positioning evolves;
- what China or India tolerate;
- or when commercial shipping confidence returns (my biggest concern by far).
There are simply too many moving parts and stakeholders, including global consumers which so far remained remarkably calm. That doesnât have to stay that way. At some point they may demand to âbombâ it open.
This is fog of war/peace territory. The most likely outcome for now is not a clean victory for anyone, but an ugly global shitty muddle-through regime with a proper recession by Q3, higher inflation & a structurally nervous energy market well into 2027.
I am pleased to officially announce that @FrenchResponse is extending its fight against disinformation on various social media platforms.
As Alastor Moody would say, âconstant vigilanceâ, and that is exactly what we will keep doing.
Have a good night, everyone!