PZ

[PZ @PFZ63]

@gerhard_mangott Hat mich auch gewundert:
Krypto die Währung der Kriminellen
und Porsche das Auto der Angeber und
Möchtegern - passt nicht zu
Ihnen.

[PZ @PFZ63]

@EUvsDisinfo @JayinKyiv Why is he still alive?

[PZ @PFZ63]

@gerhard_mangott Danke!

[PZ @PFZ63]

@zriboua https://t.co/OojhjpoVTJ

[Mossad Commentary @MOSSADil]

🚨 IRAN SETS CONDITIONS FOR NEW U.S. TALKS

According to Fars, Tehran says it will not enter a second round of talks with Washington unless its demands are met.

They include:
✔️Lifting sanctions
✔️Releasing frozen Iranian assets
✔️Compensating war damages
✔️Ending regional wars
✔️Recognizing Iran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz

Iran is calling these the minimum “confidence-building” measures before negotiations can resume.

[PZ @PFZ63]

@gerhard_mangott https://t.co/8vLNKEMF48

[Catherine Belton @CatherineBelton]

“I have the impression that part of the system is already starting to work against Putin… It’s essentially similar to what happened at the end of the Soviet Union, when people hated the Party & did everything for it to end. Putin’s Russia will follow the same path," Remeslo said

[PZ @PFZ63]

@raininginmysea @Charles_Lister 600 - 700 Barrel

[PZ @PFZ63]

@gerhard_mangott https://t.co/e07tUJfrAJ

[Zineb Riboua @zriboua]

Important to consider the Domino Effect

Losing Mali, for the Russians means losing Niger and Burkina Faso as well.

[PZ @PFZ63]

@gerhard_mangott https://t.co/8PYNP1vyPe

[Tatiana Stanovaya @Stanovaya]

For the first time since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Russian elite appears to be on the brink of an internal schism. On the one hand, the Kremlin’s continued use of the war to justify new rounds of repression makes it seem as if it’s business as usual. On the other hand, unhappiness over the recent push for total control of the internet is increasingly visible, with even loyalists starting to publicly criticize the Kremlin and predict revolution.

While each individual act of criticism may seem irrelevant, together they are significant. To use a medical analogy: minor and difficult-to-explain symptoms can be a passing inconvenience—or a sign of life-threatening illness.

https://t.co/2jslODhPKq

[PZ @PFZ63]

@jaegerthomas2 https://t.co/dEaZ11gdnA

[Robin Brooks @robin_j_brooks]

The best way to deal with a belligerent oil exporter is to cut off its oil exports. The West dropped the ball on Russia in 2022, but the US is now doing this right with Iran. Iran faces severe economic pain, capital flight and infighting. Kudos to the US.
https://t.co/tkb1sh0KHN

[PZ @PFZ63]

@jaegerthomas2 https://t.co/YA8uXYCAsY

[James E. Thorne @DrJStrategy]

Food for thought.

Iran Is Not Winning. It Is Unraveling.

The prevailing narrative on Iran has it almost perfectly reversed. We are told that Tehran is winning a war of wills in the Gulf and that Donald Trump is gambling recklessly with the world’s most sensitive chokepoint. In reality, Iran is not consolidating strength; it is managing decline. And Trump’s play on the Strait of Hormuz has quietly forced energy markets to reprice security—tilting the balance decisively toward the Americas, and away from Europe, Asia and China.
The Islamic Republic no longer resembles a confident revolutionary project.

With the old clerical core leadership shattered, power has splintered between a camp that recognises a deal with the outside world as the only path to survival and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a class of military dictators with guns, patronage networks and a rational fear that any genuine settlement will ultimately throw them overboard. This is not a unified strategy at work; it’s infighting, paranoia, a fragmented system in late-stage decay, crumbling under pressure.

Into this fragmentation, the White House has introduced a form of calibrated coercion too often caricatured as impulsive.

Around the Strait of Hormuz, Washington has threatened disruption without fully triggering it, forcing shipowners, insurers and policymakers to absorb a hard truth: dependence on vulnerable, seaborne Middle Eastern barrels is not a passing inconvenience but a structural risk. Iran can harass tankers and jolt day-to-day sentiment; it cannot rebuild a broken economy on sporadic shocks to global shipping. And the world must deal with the end of Pax Americana!

The underlying playbook is anything but novel. Sun Tzu’s insistence that “all warfare is based on deception”, Machiavelli’s counsel that a ruler must manipulate appearances and exploit factionalism, and Alfred Thayer Mahan’s argument that sea power and control of chokepoints shape the fate of nations are not museum pieces. They are, in this case, the operating code. Trump’s opaque signalling, deliberate use of disinformation and visible but limited naval posture in and around Hormuz amount to a modern, Mahanian use of sea power as economic statecraft.

Energy markets are already adjusting. Tankers are head to the Gulf of America. In a world where a single strait can a risk to economies is Europe and Asia, without ever being fully closed, assets tied to secure basins and diversified export routes deserve a premium.

The Americas sit in an enviable position: vast, politically stable hydrocarbon resources, multiple pipelines and ports, and no dependence on a distant maritime chokepoint controlled by adversaries. By contrast, Europe, much of Asia and China find themselves downstream of vulnerabilities they do not control and regimes they cannot stabilise, exposed to shipping routes that can be threatened faster than alternative supply can be mobilised.

All of this plays out against a domestic backdrop in Iran that looks less like revolutionary vigour and more like fear. A state that cannot safely keep its internet on, that must rely on public brutality to deter dissent, is not projecting confidence. It is signalling weakness, to its own citizens as much as to its rivals.

Winston Churchill once remarked that “in war, resolution; in defeat, defiance; in victory, magnanimity; in peace, goodwill.” Iran’s leadership offers only defiance, without realistic prospects of victory or peace.

The uncomfortable conclusion for those still insisting that Tehran is “winning” is that what they are observing is not the rise of a regional hegemon, but the protracted, strategically exploited unwinding of a brittle regime at the centre of an overexposed energy system.

[PZ @PFZ63]

@jaegerthomas2 https://t.co/kCTOpchBzb

[Zineb Riboua @zriboua]

My piece is now available in German

Special thanks to Neue Zürcher Zeitung!

Here is the original version in English: https://t.co/5XDKYOlku9

[PZ @PFZ63]

@jaegerthomas2 Na ja, ein System das kurz vor der Hyperinflation, also dem Systemkollaps steht,
deren Volk es zu 80% ablehnt, die Golf Staaten sie hassen, deren Proxy untergehen,
die sich intern nun zu bekämpfen beginnen, Israel und die USA ihnen militärisch..
Ich glaube sie haben keine Ahnung.

[PZ @PFZ63]

@jaegerthomas2 https://t.co/BNNQmSHgaF

Das sollten sie lesen, damit sie mal eine Ahnung haben, warum es überhaupt geht.

[Zineb Riboua @zriboua]

The Strait of Hormuz is IRGC’s last card and it was the most powerful one. They are officially cornered.

https://t.co/Sp8Wa9tbNI

[PZ @PFZ63]

@jaegerthomas2 Das große Problem für China ist die Straße von Malakka.

[PZ @PFZ63]

@jaegerthomas2 https://t.co/kvaif1n2R5

[Rick de la Torre @vrk_rick]

80% of China's oil imports pass through the Strait of Malacca, controlled by Indonesia.

@SecWar just elevated Indonesia to a Major Defense Cooperation Partnership.

That puts the United States military in position near both of the world's most critical energy chokepoints.

Beijing's energy security now runs through American partnerships.

[PZ @PFZ63]

@jaegerthomas2 https://t.co/hJkLnMCTac

[Zineb Riboua @zriboua]

The weakening of Iran’s proxies is I believe also a direct hit against China. Given how much it cultivated them.

https://t.co/dl2m2Uymbi

[PZ @PFZ63]

@gerhard_mangott Bald wird der Ferne Osten wieder ein Teil China sein und Russland als
Anghängsel Chinas bedeutungslos werden.

[PZ @PFZ63]

@jaegerthomas2 https://t.co/A5ncj1THXJ

[Robin Brooks @robin_j_brooks]

If only the US had embargoed Russia after its invasion of Ukraine. There’s no guarantee this would have ended that war, but Russia’s economy would have imploded and it’s hard to fight a war when you’re imploding. Iran will now implode. The right next step! https://t.co/aDfV3GWDZv

[PZ @PFZ63]

@jaegerthomas2 https://t.co/xE28tZI5ql

[Zineb Riboua @zriboua]

How Iran's Mosaic Doctrine Is Fracturing

Three vulnerabilities now compound one another.

The first is the mosaic doctrine’s foundational limitation under sustained pressure.

The doctrine solved the problem that Saddam could not, preventing decapitation from producing immediate collapse. It never solved attrition. The mosaic delays the timeline of dissolution but leaves the dissolution itself intact.

The cease-fire arrived at a moment of Iranian weakness, and the pressure that produced that weakness remains available to Washington. The Islamic Republic knows that each day the cease-fire holds, it does so on terms that Washington can revise.

The second vulnerability is structural.

The mosaic doctrine distributed resilience horizontally across provincial land commands, but the IRGC’s functional branches — its navy, air force, missile corps and cyber and intelligence directorates — each represent a distinct accumulation of “tiles” with separate supply chains and command structures.

The United States has dismantled these branches sequentially rather than simultaneously, degrading each functional pillar while removing leadership at the center.

The result is a system weakening from two directions at once: horizontal provincial networks loses coherence as the vertical command spine collapses, and neither compensates for the deterioration of the other.

The third vulnerability is financial, and the most immediately exposing. The IRGC’s ability to sustain operations and evade sanctions has depended on Hezbollah and the broader proxy network to move money and provide the transactional infrastructure linking the center to the periphery. That system has been degraded.

Iran’s shadow fleet — the network of vessels moving sanctioned oil through falsified documentation and ship-to-ship transfers — has faced intensified US interdiction. China-linked front companies that provided financial cover to the IRGC have been sanctioned in successive rounds by the US Treasury.

On March 31, dozens of money changers linked to the IRGC were arrested across the United Arab Emirates following the escalation of Gulf tensions after Iranian strikes, severing one of the regime’s most critical cash arteries. A network that cannot pay its operators does not remain in a network for long.

Washington enters the cease-fire holding all the cards: military dominance, financial strangulation and a regional architecture that has isolated Tehran from the Arab world it once sought to mobilize.

https://t.co/biniqizmvA