America and Israel attacked Iran again, although it would be more accurate to say that Israel attacked Iran using America, again, because they weren’t happy with how it went the last time; basically, both Trump and Iran were happy to conclude the previous war as soon as possible, with token damage inflicted. So, it is my interpretation that this time, Israel convinced Trump that Iran will fold and disintegrate immediately if they kill Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. What they, of course, knew, is that the opposite will happen – Iran will feel honour-bound to escalate the war to the point where neither party will be willing or able to just proclaim victory and finish it.
So, what are the goals now? For America, the goal is some kind of a regime collapse in Iran, or disintegration of Iran as a state. Since this is extremely unlikely to the point of being impossible, this means America doesn’t have an exit strategy, at all. They will try attacking until they are left without ammunition. Inevitably, they will suffer some extreme loss, such as an aircraft carrier being sunk or irretrievably damaged, and then they will be forced to use nuclear weapons to finish it.
For Iran, the goal is equally unclear. Ideally, they would want Israel and America to be permanently and fatally damaged, to the point of finally fucking off and leaving them alone. Since they think this is unrealistic, they are trying to survive long enough for their enemies’ corpses to float down the river of time. This means they don’t benefit from a direct confrontation, but now they are being forced into it, and there is no obvious way out. I mean, there is – they could always “salt” Israel, make it permanently and completely uninhabitable using dirty bombs, but then nuclear weapons would be used against Iran as well, and they also probably have some kind of a religious interdiction against that. But we do need to have in mind that this is technically an option for them, and Israel exists only because Iran isn’t fatally threatened. If push comes to shove and someone uses a nuke against them, I’m pretty sure they will “salt” Israel, and then all hell will break loose, everywhere.
So far, Iran’s retaliation has more-less paralysed oil and gas supply through the Strait of Hormuz, and this, together with the rest of the damage to the Emirates and everything else there, will cause serious issues to the global economy, which will persist even if the situation were to normalise immediately, which it won’t. The price of oil is going up, and America will now have to try to tear it down. If they fail, both themselves and their allies will find themselves in an immediate economic crisis, while Russia will get an advantage; China won’t be greatly affected because they are plugged into Russian supply. This is damaging the West primarily. The liquefied gas supply from Qatar has also been stopped, and it would take half a year for that to be restarted in earnest. This means Europe is going to either restart their Russian purchases, which is unlikely because they made enemies out of Russia, which is unlikely to just let this go at this point, or they are going to have a serious energy crisis.
I am expecting global supply lines to be compromised for all sorts of reasons soon enough, which will limit availability of things, putting pressure on local sources, which will result in prices going up. Production of artificial fertilisers might be further compromised, with availability and price of food becoming an issue.
This, of course, assumes a gradual and linear escalation of things not much further than they currently are. However, if something really big happens, all bets are off. Big powers are already itching to use nuclear weapons because they are out of conventional options, and with some big escalatory event, the temptation might become too much.
So, what are my recommendations? I think it’s too late for prepping. The crisis is already upon us; gold and silver started their exponential takeoff, so they are probably too expensive to buy at this point. The time to prepare by putting money there was years ago. Spiritual preparations are another matter, which is why my new book exists, I’d say.
I’m not sure if Iran will deliver just dirty bombs, I mean, they can for sure as they have more than enough of material for it, but they could be maybe even able to deliver at least dozen of nukes which is more than enough for a state of size like Israel. And now, the fetwa issued by the late Khamnei preventing Iran from pursuing nuclear weapons is not in power anymore now that he is dead so Israel could be nuked really hard. Maybe it would be enough just to nuke Dimona nuclear research center in Negev desert under presumption that’s the place where Israel stocpiles its nuclear warheads. But, that wouldn’t resolve the issue I guess because in that case the whole hell gets unleashed and America would nuke Iran and then Russia and China, and maybe even North Koread, nuke America and then we are finally screwed if we are unfortunate enough to be alive at that point.
It's easy to see what is possible, but much harder to see what is realistic. The signals from America from televangelist lunatics surrounding Trump is that this is religious war for them, they are fighting the battle of Armageddon. The Iranians must be listening to this and thinking, oh fuck, there might be no off-ramp this time. Let's see what happens.
My understanding is that this "Christian Zionism" movement in the US is carefully planted by Israel. They have been paying trips to Israel for protestant preachers for years, and they created whole theology on how Israeli state is based on the Bible, and in accordance with Christian beliefs.
Looks like it, but I think it's actually worse: they truly believe in this crap because they are theologically this dumb. Likewise, there are messianic movements in Israel that are very similar.
However, what's more interesting is that America didn't manage to bring down oil price. In fact, Božo and I were betting on them trying and succeeding, and we lost some money on that bet today. But if they didn't manage to bring it down on Friday, and they were motivated as all hell to try, I'm trying to figure out what it means about their capabilities and possible desperation in future actions.
Manipulation by actually buying and selling in the market is always short-term and expensive; I suspect that the announcement that they are going to do something in the futures markets was made in expectation that markets will believe them and try to frontrun it, doing the dirty work for them. That is, announcement WAS the manipulation, and some traders went short, causing downward pressure, but the market is obviously not buying it, and is more concerned about Hormuz than anything the Treasury might do. The Fed does stuff like that all the time, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
Oil is exploding, and it will naturally form some sort of immediate top at some point very soon because exponential growth can't last long. If I had unlimited money printer and wanted low prices, that's when I would employ that money to help short-term traders short oil and push it down as much as possible to create bearish momentum. I wouldn't try to short exponential rally like this one.
I'm actually not sure low oil prices are high priority for the US at this point; for example, they don't care about "weakening Russia by keeping prices low" anymore, but it suits them when China and the EU have to pay more. They even get to sell them their oil from fracking, which is expensive to produce, for profit, and maybe even Venezuelan oil becomes viable for refining. If they cared about price of oil that much, they wouldn't attack Iran.
But it's hard to know what anyone primary objectives and strategy are in the fog of war.
This is no longer strategy, this is thermodynamic decay of the Western Civilisation. Basically, it's a sociological equivalent of a hurricane, which looks like chaos but when you look from enough of a distance, it's ocean losing heat to the atmosphere.
They are doing today what we expected them to do before the weekend. We got it right; just early.
This is now a perfect technical top; I expect it to hold for a while, although we might have some sort of short-term bounce before falling further. Maybe something similar to silver consolidation after the crash at the end of January. This also maps perfectly to different reactions and "measures" from various governments this week, some of which are yet to come.
Ultimately, however, this is nowhere near any kind of resolution; and we have yet to see various secondary effects which are now inevitable even if the prices stay low for a while, which is unlikely. Probably something like 2021 supply shock which resulted in 2021-2022 price inflation, and various effects through different parts of economy.
One interesting tidbit is that US Navy is not escorting ships through Hormuz Strait. This is expensive, pointless and can't be done for long, as we've seen with Houthis, but I would have expected them to at least try. As of this moment, there are currently 5 US commercial vessels in the Persian Gulf, but no Navy vessels. Maybe they don't really want low price of oil for their citizens as much as higher price for their enemies and frenemies.
Nothing can go there without getting sunk. Trump is full of shit. Also, even if the traffic restored, the high prices are baked into the system for the next few months. The reason why America thinks they can dump cheap futures to lower the price is that they count on buying oil from Russia when they have to deliver.
I believe that their primary objective is to energetically isolate China, and the same goal was major reason for Venezuela operation. They don't really care too much if US citizens suffer from high gas prices in the process, although they will try to mitigate it somewhat as it's bad PR.
American strategic goals might be secondary to Israel's strategic goals, I'm afraid. I mean, sure – America is trying to damage/destroy its competition, and so far it's working. But Israel's strategic goal is to use America to destroy its local competition/threats before America degrades to the point of being useful, and all American middle-eastern adventures so far make sense only if you see them as Israel de-industrialising and de-civilising Muslim countries that could possibly be a threat in a world without America.
Which makes me conclude that Israel believes that America is done and they need to use it to destroy Iran now. And by destroy I mean irrecoverably and permanently destroy, which won't work without nukes, and Israel doesn't want to use those themselves because that would make them a legitimate target for Muslim retaliation. So, use America.