By Saturday evening, however, he had completely cancelled the attack, posting that Iran and several Middle Eastern countries had asked him to wait because they had supposedly agreed on the outline of a massive deal: the Strait of Hormuz would reopen, Iran’s nuclear threat would vanish, and Israel would be wrapped into the whole neat little package. Predictably, the internet immediately split into its usual binary camps: half the room decided the initial threat was pure theater from a guy who ultimately prefers dealmaking over bombing, while the other half accused him of losing his nerve the second a general showed him a map.

Both of those hot takes completely miss the actual brick that got thrown through the window. Tehran never publicly offered those concessions, and within hours, Fars (the Iranian wire service linked directly to the regime) was openly dunking on his account, calling his claims about Hormuz fantasy land while insisting management of the strait remained under their exclusive control. The crucial intervention actually came from Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, who released an unusually candid summary of his call with Trump emphasizing the necessity of dialogue; translated into plain English, the Saudis were gently reminding Washington that striking Iranian oil fields meant Iranian missiles landing on Saudi oil fields, and because those two power grids sit right next door to each other, Riyadh was standing directly inside the splash zone. Qatar, the UAE, Turkey, and Pakistan were all screaming into the phone for the exact same reason: their proximity to the battlefield gave them leverage, and a Gulf monarch publicly demonstrated that he could halt an American strike package with a single phone call.

From the outside, this strategy looks completely erratic; you degrade capability, squeeze the strait, hit infrastructure, pause, get called a coward, and repeat… but when you step back, it looks less like random mood swings and far more like a controlled escalation routine designed to shape Iran’s information environment one painful step at a time. Look at the regime’s sheer panic: the fact that a state-linked news outlet felt compelled to contradict the American president before their own government could even formulate a formal statement proves just how desperate someone inside that system was to convince the domestic public that Tehran hadn’t just gotten bullied. Sure, Trump makes this ten times harder on himself by negotiating in broad daylight on social media before the ink is dry, but the real truth won’t be found in tweets or press releases; it will be found at the Strait of Hormuz over the next two weeks, specifically in the massive, awkward gap between what Washington claims was agreed upon and what actually happens on the water. Meanwhile, countries like the UAE spent the weekend doing absolute zero military heavy lifting, quietly positioning themselves to collect all the political dividend checks the second the dust finally settles.

Today, I owe you a correction. I want to be precise here, because the story changed twice in twenty-four hours, and I only reported the first version. So here’s the timeline:

On Tuesday, the Department of Energy announced that the United States had signed a civil nuclear agreement with Riyadh, including a so-called 123 agreement and a separate safeguards accord, creating a deal that could last for decades and be worth billions of dollars with American companies selling nuclear reactor technology to Saudi Arabia.

But the official announcement did not say whether Saudi Arabia would be allowed to enrich uranium, as it did not permit enrichment, but it did not explicitly rule it out either; naturally, the press filled that silence with the absolute most explosive interpretation available, and frankly, I did too.

Then, on Wednesday, Trump posted this—and I am quoting the actual post here: “The Civil Nuclear Deal (There will be no enrichment of material!)... will be approved, but is totally subject to Saudi Arabia joining the very respected and successful Abraham Accords.”

Read that twice, because Trump did two completely separate things in a single post: first, he killed the enrichment story, which is the correction I owe you, meaning as of today and according to the public record, there will be no uranium enrichment on Saudi soil.

Second, he added an entirely new condition to an agreement his own government had announced as signed just one day earlier, considering normalization with Israel did not appear anywhere in Tuesday’s announcement, yet by Wednesday morning, Trump casually declared the nuclear deal was “totally subject” to Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords.

If you have watched Trump or Elon Musk operate for long enough, you will recognize the exact rhythm: they build the plane while it is already flying, break things first, ask questions later, and change course in public while everyone else is still desperately reading the fine print.

For Trump, a signature has never meant that a negotiation is over; a signature is usually just another opening bid, and the other side often ends up learning about the new terms on social media. That appears to be how the Saudis learned about this condition too: in the exact same absurd way you and I did.

And before anyone asks, yes, Congress still gets a turn, because a 123 agreement must be submitted to Congress before it can take effect, which means this deal still has at least two more opportunities to completely change shape: one in Washington and another in Riyadh.

Which brings us to the real question: why would Trump tie Saudi Arabia to Israel now, right in the middle of a war, when the Saudis have explicitly rejected that trade for years?

My guess is that the nuclear reactors were never the real point here. The giveaway is a specific number that popped up in the world’s turbine order books this summer:

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This week, Iran was bombed for the eleventh consecutive night in a war that officially began over uranium enrichment, while simultaneously, the White House approved a thirty-year nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia that could place a full-scale uranium-enrichment facility on Saudi soil, built and operated entirely by American companies. Mohammed bin Salman has been chasing this exact prize for a decade, and Trump just handed him the signed paperwork without including the one mandatory condition attached to every previous draft: Saudi Arabia no longer has to normalize relations with Israel.

If you trace that domino chain, the picture gets wild, because if Riyadh can secure centrifuges simply by signing a commercial contract with Washington, the cost of enrichment in the Middle East has ceased to be peace with Israel, turning instead into basic geopolitical alignment with the United States. For fifteen years, the absolute gold standard for these deals was the UAE model, under which Abu Dhabi built the Barakah nuclear power plant—the only operating nuclear plant in the Arab world—by agreeing to some of the absolute strictest nonproliferation constraints on the planet. This week, Washington threw out that playbook and started writing contracts under entirely different terms, and the second those rules become flexible, governments in Ankara and Cairo start doing the math, just as a post-war Tehran will the moment the dust settles. Which brings us to the core mystery here: why on earth is Washington passing out centrifuges like party favors in the middle of a war allegedly fought to stop the spread of centrifuges?

The answer isn’t hiding in Riyadh, nor is it sitting in Tehran; it lives in Washington, where the three men managing this war are actually fighting three entirely different conflicts:

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(You know, the exact kind of toll his own Secretary of State called completely illegal just a month ago.)

Naturally, that fee evaporated in less than twenty-four hours, replaced by vague, hand-waving promises of “trade and investment deals” from the very same Gulf states who were supposed to pay it in the first place.

But there is something incredibly important I left out of the video: back on June 21, just four days after the ink dried on the ceasefire, the US Treasury quietly slid a piece of paper across the table called General License X. For the first time in years, this license allowed Iran to sell its oil out in the open and in actual US dollars; the ceasefire was just the pretty wrapping paper on a giant box of cold, hard cash. When the tankers started burning, the Treasury panicked and revoked the license, leaving us with its decaying zombie sibling, General License X1. That license officially expires at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time on Thursday, July 17, and because no new oil loadings have been authorized since July 7, we are looking at a direct, slow-motion trainwreck between Washington and Tehran.

The White House desperately needs this license to die a loud, public death because a carrot is only useful if you can actually take it away; meanwhile, Iran’s oil minister, Mohsen Paknejad, has already scoffed and said the oil will keep flowing regardless. By Friday morning, we’re looking at a binary reality: either Iranian crude completely stops loading, or the entire trade slides into the dark, greasy underbelly of the black market. If it goes dark, the only buyers brave (or shameless!) enough to touch it will be Chinese refiners, forcing Trump into the exact nightmare scenario he’s spent his entire presidency dodging: he can either sanction Chinese refiners in the middle of a war, opening a second economic front against Beijing, or stand there and let the entire world watch his high-profile blockade leak like a dollar-store bucket. Whichever choice he makes will ripple outward, directly affecting the price of every barrel of oil, every shipment of liquefied natural gas, and every single megawatt of electricity feeding the world’s power-hungry data centers.

What Monday Actually Told Us

Let’s look at what the market actually did on Monday, because the screaming cable-news headlines are usually written by people who think oil comes from a magic tap under the earth:

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If you watched today’ video on my Power Pundit Youtube channel, you already know that Trump is going full realpolitik with both Netanyahu and Erdoğan.

The recap: Monday and Tuesday, three tankers got holes put in them in the Strait of Hormuz, and Washington says Iran did it. Tuesday night, the United States hit more than 80 targets inside Iran, including Kharg Island, the island that handles about 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports. Wednesday morning, at the NATO summit in Ankara, Trump declared the ceasefire dead: “As far as I am concerned, it’s over.” Brent jumped five percent.

And within hours of killing that ceasefire, Trump handed Erdoğan the two things Turkey has wanted since 2019: he’s lifting the CAATSA sanctions, the ones that punish countries for buying Russian weapons, and he’s opening the door to selling Turkey the F-35. One day after Netanyahu went on American television and begged him not to.

So what did Erdoğan do to earn it? I checked the record, and... Turkey’s record is nearly empty. Turkey declined to join the Iran campaign, contributed no offensive assets, and when the ceasefire got brokered in June, the brokers were Qatar and Pakistan, not Turkey. Meanwhile Spain declined the same campaign and got called a terrible partner in front of thirty governments.

The difference, for anyone who has been paying attention, is that Erdoğan let Trump author a story where Turkish neutrality was a personal favor to Trump, and never corrected him. He converted nothing into loyalty, then collected it in stealth fighters, with cannons and cavalry at the airport as the invoice.

But that leaves the real question: why pay him now, this week, that exact morning? My guess is that Trump is not paying for the past. He is paying for what he needs next. And what he needs next has a deadline on it, sitting on the Treasury’s website right now, dated July 17, and will tell you where the energy markets are moving next:

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Here’s what the news part leaves out: Qatar hosts Al Udeid, the largest American base in the entire region, the command center for this whole war. Zero missiles landed there. The UAE hosts another major American installation. Untouched. And the order for all of this went out during the funeral of Iran’s Supreme Leader, with no named decision-maker anywhere near it. The IRGC put out the statements. The parliament speaker did the defiance. Nobody signed the decision.

A cornered animal doesn’t check the address before it bites. Whoever is running Iran this week checked every address. Spared the mediator. Spared the economic escape hatch. Hit the two hosts least able to answer on their own. And never once claimed the tanker attacks, even though everyone on earth knows it was Iran, because the doubt itself is doing a very specific job.

Every one of those choices matches a named pattern from the book I’m building, and the pattern has a history, including one case from 1941 where an oil cutoff almost identical to the one Washington just scheduled for July 17 turned a calculating government into a gambling one in under five months.

Here’s the pattern’s name and how the trick actually works, the 1941 case and what it changes about the July 17 deadline, and the forecast I’m putting on the record, with the exact signals that would prove me wrong:

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That was quite a sight to behold. The most powerful man on Earth, ruler of an empire stretching from India to Egypt, sitting on a hillside above the sea with scribes kneeling at his feet, ready to record the names of the captains who fought well that day. On paper, he was there to command a battle, but he was more like enjoying one.

Below him, the strait of Salamis. A ribbon of water roughly a mile wide, pinched between the Greek mainland and a small rocky island. Inside that ribbon, a few hundred Greek warships; waiting for him…

…or, so he thought.

It was September of 480 BC and the Greeks were, by any sane accounting, finished. Athens had already fallen, and the smoke from the burning Acropolis was visible from the water; the Greek commanders crammed onto that little island were not planning their glorious stand, but instead, screaming at each other in a war council that kept threatening to dissolve. The Peloponnesians wanted to abandon the position and retreat south to defend their own homes behind a wall; but if the fleet scattered, the war was over.

Everyone knew it.

Xerxes knew it best of all, which is why he was in no hurry. His fleet outnumbered the Greeks something like three to one; all he had to do was wait for his enemies to fall apart, which Greeks could always be counted on to do.

One Athenian commander, Themistocles, understood that the argument in the war council could not be won with more arguing, so… he stopped arguing. That night he sent a single man across the water. Sicinnus, the slave who tutored his children, rowed quietly to the Persian lines carrying a private message for the Great King:

The Greeks are at each other’s throats. They plan to slip away under cover of darkness, and Themistocles himself, seeing which way the wind blows, secretly favors your cause. Seal the exits tonight, and at dawn you will bag the entire Greek fleet without a real fight.

Now, put yourself in Xerxes’s sandals for a moment. A message arrives, at night, from an enemy commander, delivered by a slave, promising you everything you want. Every instinct should scream ‘trap’. Persian kings did not build empires by being naive about deception; they practically invented the genre.

But look closer at what the message actually contained. It told Xerxes that Greeks were fractious, and he already believed that. It told him his enemies were terrified of him. And… he already believed that, too. It told him that smart men defect to the winning side, and his entire court was living proof of it. The message asked him to believe nothing new; it only asked him to act on what his own pride had been whispering for months.

So he believed it, because he needed to.

The order went out: Persian crews rowed all night, sealing both exits of the strait, and at first light the great fleet pushed into the narrows to collect its prize. Hundreds of ships funneled into water with room for dozens. Rams with nowhere to swing. Hulls fouling friendly hulls. Exhausted rowers who had been at their oars since midnight, facing Greeks who had slept, who had trained in that exact water their whole lives, and who now had nowhere left to retreat to, anyway.

By evening, the Persian fleet was wreckage, and the most powerful man on Earth was watching it from a silver-footed throne, while the scribes at his feet recorded something very different from what he had brought them to record.

The strait didn’t win that battle

Every textbook will tell you Salamis was won by geography. Narrow water neutralized superior numbers. And that is true, as far as it goes.

But that strait had been sitting there for ten thousand years before that morning, and it had never won anything by itself. Water has no opinion about who sails into it; the strait only became a weapon at the exact moment a man on the other side chose to enter it, and he chose to enter it because another man had read him correctly: read his pride, read his impatience, read his need to believe that his enemies were already broken. Themistocles did not defeat the Persian navy. He defeated Xerxes’s certainty, and the navy followed it into the rocks.

That gap between the map and the mind is where I work. I have spent sixteen years reading human behavior professionally, and the longer I apply that craft to the people who run the world, the more that gap looks like the most important and least covered territory in all of geopolitics. So I gave it a name.

The definition

Behavioral geopolitics is the discipline of reading the observable behavior of the individuals who hold state power: their signals, their patterns, and their deviations under pressure, in order to explain and forecast the actions of nations. Its core claim is simple: geography sets the board and resources load the stakes, but decisions are made by human beings, and human beings can be read.

If you want it in a single line: behavioral geopolitics is the study of how the psychology and observable behavior of individual leaders drive the decisions of nations.

And if you want it in nine words:

Maps set the board while minds move the pieces.

…but doesn’t geopolitics already cover this?

This is the first objection I hear, and it deserves a straight answer.

Classical geopolitics is built on a quiet ranking: the permanent over the personal. Mountains, rivers, chokepoints, resource deposits, warm-water ports, you name it. The idea is that these things constrain nations so heavily that the individual in charge is almost a rounding error. Tim Marshall wrote a genuinely great book on this premise, Prisoners of Geography, and if you haven’t read it, you should. The board is critical; it will always be, and it would be disingenuous of me to argue otherwise.

But watch what happens when you analyze this closer.

Take the Strait of Hormuz, the most analyzed stretch of water on the planet, the throat through which a fifth of the world’s oil passes. Ask a classical geopolitics analyst about Hormuz and you’ll get depth charts, tanker counts and chokepoint theory. All accurate, and all beside the point when the moment comes. Because Hormuz has hydrography; it does not have actual policy. Water does not mine itself. If someone in Tehran decides to mine it, or toll it, or rattle sabers over it, or leave it alone, and that decision comes out of a human mind operating under pressure, with an ego, a fear of looking weak, a memory of past humiliations, and a succession problem breathing down its neck. Geography sets the menu and the prices, but ultimately, it is a human who orders the main course.

Let’s take a closer look at maps themselves; show me a border that drew itself. The Suez Canal, the Panama Canal, the specific route of every pipeline, nearly every border on Earth: each one was put there by people who decided where it would go… usually over the objections of other people. Half of what we call the “geo” layer today is simply yesterday’s leaders’ decisions hardened into terrain. The map is fossilized behavior. So the geography-first position doesn’t just struggle to predict the future; it can’t even explain its own board without smuggling human decisions back in.

There is also a precedent for exactly this move, and if you have a finance background you lived through it. Economics was always, by its own definition, the study of human choice. Then the field spent decades amputating the human to look more like physics, building elegant models around a perfectly rational actor who has never existed. When Kahneman, Tversky, and Thaler put the human back in, critics said the phrase “behavioral economics” was redundant. Economics is already about behavior, they said; they were… technically right, and it didn’t matter, because the field really had deleted the thing the new word restored. “Behavioral” named the missing organ. Today, the redundant term has a Nobel Prize and a permanent seat at the table.

The word “geopolitics” itself carries the same lesson. It was coined in 1899 with a strict geographic-determinism meaning, spent the 1940s disgraced by the company it kept, and was revived in the 1970s already stripped of determinism, meaning little more than great-power politics. The term has been re-coined before. This is the second time, and this time the re-coining restores what got hollowed out: the human beings holding the pens.

Isn’t this just realism with a new name?

Second objection from a sharper crowd, that also deserves a straight answer.

Go back and read Hans Morgenthau, the father of modern realism. The foundation of Politics Among Nations is explicitly human nature: the drive for power, the lust to dominate, embedded in man himself. Realism began as a psychological claim. Then the field, chasing scientific respectability, did what economics did. It swapped flesh-and-blood leaders for interchangeable “rational actors” maximizing “national interest,” and the human vanished into the equations. Realists already agree with me; they just forgot to say so out loud.

Here is the actual dividing line: Realism describes the game: anarchy, power balancing, security dilemmas. All that is really useful; but realism has no procedure whatsoever for reading an individual. It cannot tell you what to watch in a specific leader’s conduct, which deviations from his own baseline matter, or when his personal pattern is about to override the “rational” move. It treats every player as the same player. Behavioral geopolitics supplies the missing instrument: the observational discipline realism needs and never built. One describes the chessboard while the other studies the man reaching for the piece, and whether his hand is steady.

The test that keeps this honest

Now, the objection I take most seriously, because it’s the one I would raise myself: a framework that can explain everything explains nothing. If every event can be retrofitted with a psychological story, this is astrology in a suit. And I was born in September, so I naturally have doubts about astrology!

But regarding Behavioral Geopolitics, this is why the discipline polices its own boundary with a very simple gate, and I submit every case to this test before including ‘behavioral’ in any of my analyses:

Would swapping the leader have swapped the outcome?

A besieged city, out of food, facing overwhelming force, surrenders. It surrenders under any commander. That outcome belongs to arithmetic, and behavioral geopolitics has no claim on it and should shut up about it. The discipline only activates when the specific mind in the chair changed the result.

February 2022 is the cleanest modern example. Run the material case for invading Ukraine the way a generic rational actor would: the economic exposure, the military risk assessments, the near-certain unification of NATO, the sanctions math. The spreadsheet said no. Nearly every Western government reading that same spreadsheet concluded the invasion wouldn’t happen, precisely because they were modeling a rational actor. One specific man, isolated through two years of pandemic, marinating in a very particular reading of history and legacy, said ‘yes’. Swap the man, and you very plausibly swap the outcome. That is a behaviorally dominant event, and everyone who modeled the board instead of the player got wrong the biggest European call in a generation.

One more boundary so we’re clear about what this discipline is not about. There is no couch here; I don’t diagnose anyone from a distance, and I have no interest in claims about what a leader secretly feels. The raw material is strictly observable: what a man does, what he repeats, and what he stops doing when the pressure arrives. Patterns and deviations. The same evidence available to anyone, read with a method most people overlook.

It is true that I come from a body language reading background, but in this case, our pattern recognition has to be tuned to a higher level, making sure to trace actions and words, because virtually all leaders are good diplomats in person. Their bodies say the civilized thing for the cameras, their words spread the propaganda, and their actions (or lack thereof) are what end up speaking volumes.

Where the reading actually leads us

The beautiful thing about this discipline is that the people we need to read at any given time are few, identifiable, and currently holding the pen over the two biggest repricing events of this decade.

Look at the main characters right now. In Washington, one man’s relationship with headlines and social media can move global markets between breakfast and lunch, which makes his behavioral baseline, and his deviations from it, more predictive than most official statements. In Beijing, power has concentrated to the point where the number of minds worth reading has shrunk… while the weight of each read has multiplied. Moscow already gave us the defining case study of the era. Europe mostly decides by committee, which is precisely why it moves slowest and reads hardest; there’s rarely a single mind to model. And in Abu Dhabi you find the opposite proof of the same theorem: a place where the distance between a decision and its execution is shorter than almost anywhere on Earth, which turns decision-making speed itself into a strategic asset that raw resource endowments can’t buy.

Downstream of all these minds sit the stakes. Energy first: the price of oil and gas has always moved on decisions long before it moves on molecules, and the decisions come from the short list of people above. And now a second, bigger stake stacked on top of the first: the race to build the physical body of artificial intelligence, the power plants, chips, land, cooling, and industrial capacity that AI actually runs on. That race will be decided by a handful of state-level choices about energy and infrastructure…

…which means it will be decided by the readable behavior of the people making them.

That is the full chain of this discipline, and the order never reverses: behavior is the upstream why; energy and physical AI are the downstream stakes. Read the mind, then follow the money it moves.

An honest note about ancestry

I want to be precise about the claim I’m making.

I am not claiming nobody ever noticed that leaders matter. Political psychology has existed in the academy for ages; there are journal papers on leadership traits, scattered essays that have used phrases like this one, entire intelligence agencies with leadership-analysis desks whose work you and I will never see. The ingredients have been lying around for decades.

My claim is consolidation. Nobody has assembled those ingredients into a named, coherent, usable discipline for the person who actually reads the news: a public definition, a scoping test that keeps it falsifiable, and a working method applied in the open, day after day, on the record, where being wrong is visible. That assembled thing did not exist. Now it does, and this page is its foundation stone.

Back to the hillside

So, Xerxes went home; he left his general Mardonius behind to lose the land war, and the greatest invasion force the ancient world had ever assembled, unraveled because one king believed a message that flattered him, delivered by a slave in a rowboat.

Twenty-five centuries later, we have satellites over every strait and depth charts of every chokepoint on Earth, and we still get the biggest calls wrong for the same reason the Great King did: we model the board and ignore the player; because the strait, whether it’s Salamis or Hormuz, was the backdrop, secondary to the throne on the hillside.

Maps set the board while minds move the pieces.

If you want to see the discipline actually working, applied to the people holding the pen right now, that’s what I do here every day.

Commerce Department, Bureau of Industry and Security, Howard Lutnick’s signature at the bottom. The message was simple and it was devastating:

“Shut down Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for every user on earth, effective immediately, because some of those users might be foreign nationals.”

And Anthropic did exactly that. Not because they agreed, but because “deemed export” rules don’t give you a choice. Two of the most capable AI systems ever built went dark globally, within hours, pending further review.

Now I want to be fair here: the official reason was a jailbreak. Amazon researchers reportedly found a method to get Fable 5 to surface cybersecurity vulnerabilities in ways that alarmed someone in Washington. Anthropic’s position was that the same capability already exists in OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, which was not touched by the order. A security researcher who reviewed the actual underlying work described it as defensive research, not a weapon; but Anthropic called it “a narrow, non-universal jailbreak” involving asking the model to read a codebase and identify flaws, something their statement pointed out is “used every day by the defenders who keep systems safe.”

But here’s what the mainstream media has not been putting together in the same sentence:

This wasn’t and isolated incident.

In February 2026, the Pentagon wanted Anthropic to waive the contractual restrictions on Claude’s use for two specific things: mass domestic surveillance of American citizens, and fully autonomous lethal weapons, the kind that decide to fire without a human in the loop.

Anthropic refused.

The Trump administration’s response was to label Anthropic a “supply chain risk.” That designation had never before been applied to an American company; it had been used for Huawei, ZTE, actual foreign adversaries.

The government was treating a San Francisco AI lab the way it treats Chinese Communist Party-linked infrastructure companies.

Anthropic filed federal lawsuits in March. Two courts, two different filings. The relationship was not what you’d call cordial.

And then a jailbreak appeared in June, and… well, the models went dark.

Now let’s do one of my favorite intellectual exercises and ask a simple question. If the jailbreak was the real concern, why was GPT-5.5 not touched? Researchers who reviewed the underlying work said Fable’s capabilities in this area were comparable to what GPT-5.5 could already do. The order landed specifically, surgically, on the one company that had spent four months refusing to build the Pentagon’s weapons.

I’m not saying the jailbreak wasn’t real. I’m not saying no security concern existed. What I’m saying is that the pattern of behavior between these two actors, across four months of lawsuits and supply chain designations and Congressional briefings, tells you something that the official explanation alone does not account for. A behavioral read doesn’t end at the stated reason. It starts there and asks what the history of the relationship looks like.

And the answer to that question leads straight to the most ironic plot twist in the entire global AI story of 2026; because on the other side of Washington’s kill switch, something extraordinary happened.

The Little Chinese Lab That Could

A Chinese AI lab called Z.ai announced a new open-source model and its stock jumped more than 30% on the Hong Kong exchange within days. DeepSeek, the Chinese AI startup that has been a recurring nightmare for American AI executives, closed a funding round of approximately $7.4 billion, their largest ever, essentially the same week. On OpenRouter, the platform where developers choose which model to use for their work, the top four most-used models after the ban were all Chinese.

Not one or two. All four.

Washington’s kill switch worked exactly as designed. It just… wasn’t designed for the enemy it was pointed at, I guess.

The vault it was protecting had already been emptied, and months before Howard Lutnick signed that letter. Through a method so mundane, so openly documented, so brazen, that calling it a “black market” almost understates how above ground this operation actually was. And the people who emptied it didn’t need a jailbreak at all. They just needed API keys, fake accounts, and a lot of patience.

Which brings me to the part of this that has nothing to do with jailbreaks or export control lawyers, and everything to do with something most people aren’t tracking yet:

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That shift played out publicly on June 17, 2026, in a dining room at the Palace of Versailles. Donald Trump picked up a pen, paused visibly for the cameras, muttered that “this was not easy,” and signed.

Iran did not beg for that signature; they simply waited for the clock to run out.

The mainstream media missed the real story here, framing the resulting memorandum of understanding as a standard diplomatic breakthrough, a ceasefire, a stepping stone to peace, a win for Western statecraft. Strip away the ceremonial staging, though, and it is obvious this is not a diplomatic event at all. It is a massive energy event. It is the exact moment the global market realized the Strait of Hormuz is no longer a theoretical threat. It is a switch. And Tehran is the one holding it.

Before February 2026, the idea of Iran shutting down the Strait was a ghost story. Conventional wisdom held that doing so would mean instant regime annihilation, that the U.S. military would immediately deploy overwhelming force to clear the lanes. Because the assumed cost was so absolute, nobody expected Tehran to actually pull the trigger. The threat functioned purely as a deterrent.

Then Iran pulled the trigger anyway.

They choked off the Strait, and the global economy instantly went into convulsions. Oil skyrocketed, insurance markets paralyzed overnight, and shipping lanes rerouted around entire continents. Yet the world’s most formidable military did not mount a massive, forced reopening. Instead, Washington opted to talk. The administration sent the Vice President to Islamabad to sit down with Iran’s parliament speaker, himself a former Revolutionary Guards commander, and hammer out a deal.

The resulting memorandum includes sweeping oil export waivers, the unfreezing of tens of billions in frozen assets, a promised $300 billion reconstruction fund, and a polite 60 day window to figure out who actually gets to run the Strait.

Iran absorbed the initial pressure, held the line, and walked away with massive concessions.

That structural change is the only reality that matters for global energy moving forward. The nuclear portfolio and the formal 14 point agendas are secondary noise. It does not even matter if this 60 day window yields a permanent treaty. Spoiler alert: it won’t. Iran has zero incentive to hurry when every week of dragged out negotiation means unmolested oil revenues, thawed capital flows, and a chance for the IRGC to rebuild infrastructure without fear of airstrikes.

Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s chief negotiator, laid the cards on the table right after the signing, noting that the Strait of Hormuz “will never return to its previous condition.” That is not empty posturing; it is an explicit policy statement. The MOU explicitly punts the future administration of the waterway to a joint Iranian Oman authority. The entire question of transit tolls has been parked, giving Iran a permanent lever to pull in this negotiation and every single one that follows.

A ghost threat has been weaponized and validated. And once a weapon is proven effective, you don’t just put it back in the box.

Most geopolitical commentary will stop right here, focusing on the immediate ceasefire mechanics and the likely extension of the 60 day clock. But the real macro story is happening beneath the surface. This single event is already silently repricing two massive sectors that rarely get analyzed together: global energy logistics and the artificial intelligence compute race.

Surprisingly, the player moving fastest to capitalize on this convergence is not Washington, Beijing, or Riyadh. It is the UAE. What Abu Dhabi quietly executed while the rest of the world was glued to bomb damage assessments and press briefings tells you exactly where global capital is heading over the next decade. However, the true mechanics of this shift rely on an unacknowledged financial network, one that links Western tech giants to Iranian shadow operations through a single, highly surprising node:

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Here is the part the angry takes keep skipping. The strait reopened. Toll free. For exactly sixty days. And oil did not fall back to where it sat before the war, nowhere close. The market is quietly pricing something the headlines are not even looking at, and the number underneath it is the whole story:

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Thirty minutes later, Iran’s Foreign Ministry said the signing would not happen tomorrow. They said it… well, could happen “in the coming days.”

If you watched my latest video, you know where this is going.

The pattern I described then: Trump announcing a deal, the market pricing it in, and the terms getting disputed in public before anyone signs anything, ran again this week, in fast-forward, and now with a date stamp. The S&P added over a trillion dollars in market value on Wednesday’s announcement. Oil collapsed below $87. All of that happened before a single signature.

Now, I want to be fair here, because there are two ways to read what’s happening. The first is that Trump is genuinely close to something real, and the public contradictions between Washington and Tehran are what negotiations look like when they’re happening across a dozen countries and two governments that don’t trust each other. Pakistan’s prime minister said a deal was “closer than ever before” and expected to be finalized within 24 hours. That’s three sovereign governments triangulating toward the same word: tomorrow.

The second reading is that Trump needed this signed before Sunday, because Sunday is his 80th birthday, and a peace deal on your 80th birthday is the kind of thing you mention at every rally for the next six months before any midterm. And also, a very, very Trump thing to do.

I honestly don’t know which one is true. Maybe both. The behavioral read is focused on the gap between what someone says and what they do, and right now the gap between “scheduled to be signed tomorrow” and “we have not yet made a final decision” is the width of an ocean.

But here’s what I do know: The Islamabad Memorandum, named after Pakistan’s capital, not coincidentally, since Pakistan is the country that made the three phone calls that stopped the bombers three hours before they flew, calls for the Strait of Hormuz to reopen, the naval blockade lifted within 30 days, a 60-day ceasefire extension including Lebanon, and Iran committing to never acquiring a nuclear weapon. That last line is what Trump keeps leading with.

Sounds… clean? Sounds like a win, to be honest.

Any actual action on Iran’s nuclear program: the physical hardware, the enriched material, the centrifuges, only happens if a second deal is reached. A separate negotiation. To be held during a 60-day window that starts after the MOU is signed. The 2015 nuclear agreement, which everyone agrees was incomplete, took roughly 18 months to negotiate. So, sixty days is a bit of wishful thinking.

And Iran’s foreign minister said, on the record, that his preferred method for dealing with the enriched uranium is to dilute it inside Iran. Under inspectors, yes. Inside Iran, yes. Which means the material stays in the country while the second negotiation runs its clock.

When Trump says this is a “wall to no nuclear weapon,” he is describing the commitment Iran is making about the outcome. He is not describing what happens to the 440 kilograms of enriched material that produces the weapon. Those are two different sentences, and only one of them is in this MOU.

To be clear: this might still be the best deal available, given everything I described on my video about why you can’t simply bomb the country flat and call it done. The constraints are real. The GCC’s preferences are real. But “best available option under the circumstances” and “the deal Trump described tonight on Truth Social” are not always the same document, and understanding the gap between those two things is exactly why you’re here.

There are two other stories from this week that connect to all of the above in ways nobody is putting together yet, and one of them involves a number that makes Iran’s $300 billion demand look like a rounding error:

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Doesn’t America have the guns to thoroughly glass Tehran three times over? Of course it has the firepower. Only fools could question that fact. It demonstrated it has the ability to surgically remove dictators at will, either in a Nike jumpsuit or a bodybag, whichever comes first.

Then why can’t Trump just ‘finish the job’ and stop what has been dragging for 100 days?

Ok, let’s do one of my favorite intellectual exercises and imagine that something Michael-Bay worthy happens. Trump does the nod, Hegseth nods in return, and Tehran, as well as any relevant IRGC outpost, bridge and power plant in Iran is turned into a Walmart parking lot. Just with a little more rubble than an actual Walmart parking lot.

Got that image in your head? Nice. What do you expect the Iranian regime is going to do in that situation? They will still have several dozen missiles and a couple hundred drones to launch. To... launch at what? Well, if I had to make a guess, I’d say they’d launch several of those at the UAE, or Bahrain, or Kuwait. Especially the latter two, since the UAE has demonstrated robust defense systems and the IRGC would want to do one and only one thing:

Maximum damage to whoever in the GCC that has even remote ties to Washington. Or despises the Iranian ‘ruling model’ of the past 47 years. Or both.

That’s the problem when you look at this from a ‘burn the ships’ perspective. Of course you’re not burning your own ships in this case, you’re burning the Iranian regime’s leeway to... well, exist as a proper country. Especially the ‘bomb the bridges and power plants’ part. That, in fact, will affect innocent Iranians more than the regime itself. In fact, that would actually turn neutral Iranians AGAINST America as well.

But the main problem for the Trump administration would be the *cornered* Iranian regime. Because we all know what happens when you corner rats. Or regimes, in this case. Burned ships mean there is no possibility of retreat and all that is left is to fight to the death and take with you as many enemies as you can. We can all agree that’s what would happen.

So, instead of glassing Tehran three times over, you take out their main missile pads, radar systems, naval units and then some. You send a strong message with a single request: drop your nuke dreams. That’s exactly what has been... politely requested since the start of the Iran war and to be fair with the Orange Man, the guy and Marco Rubio have been 100% consistent about that. Not ‘regime change’, not ‘justice for the tens of thousands protestors killed’, nope. The heart of the matter has always been nukes and nothing else. And since the bunker busters back in June 2025 didn’t finish the job, then that’s why a more ‘personal’ request had to be made.

I used to think that the IRGC were the same kind of dudes who blow themselves up in the name of religious reasons. But no, they happen to be quite smart and pragmatic about it and instead, they encourage and train and prop up other groups, like Hezbollah and the Houthis, to do the dirty bomb work for them. I guess that they like breathing more than they like the ‘death to America’ motto, so they appeal to proxies. That alone tells you that you’re dealing with people who are evil, yes, but at the same time they don’t want to end up in gibs in the name of whatever they believe.

And this, for the most part, has been obvious because of how the ceasefire has stayed put. Granted, some stray drones and missiles have broken the ceasefire here and there, but let’s not forget that upon the death of the Ayatollah, and the dubious cardboard replacement put in place, the IRGC is a group of thirty plus divisions that pretty much act on their own. So it’s not that hard to imagine that every time Iran’s president Pezeshkian is close to a deal with the Western Demons, a rogue IRGC commander decides to drive a pickup to the shore himself and launch a couple drones at Abu Dhabi. That’s not something that Tehran can actually control, and that’s by design by Tehran themselves. Trump’s words “A ceasefire in the Middle East is just shooting a bit less” (I’m paraphrasing here), are not that far from reality. The Middle East has always been extremely complex and I’m not even adding Israel and Lebanon.

So, right now I’m writing this and I’m sure that Trump must be sharing to his social media channels that either they’re really, really close to a great deal OR that he’s about to glass Tehran for good. In fact, he just said that he was about to take Kharg Island, which hosts 90% of Iran’s oil exporting capacity. I’m not going to say I have an uncanny ability to call out bluffs (I sometimes do, nevertheless), but my main question here would be, why wouldn’t you do exactly that, seize control of Kharg Island and use it as the main leverage since day one? Why wait one hundred days? Maybe there’s some kind of 7D military strategy here that someone can explain to me but I honestly can’t imagine how it could explain this in a simple way.

Which is why, understandably, people are starting to affirm that Trump is openly bluffing. I just did, in the previous paragraph. But there’s another approach, more subtle, that is Trump going step by step, ramping up the heat progressively to see if the Iran regime reacts at some point. But that wouldn’t make sense because 1) it’s 100 days of American military resources in the Arabian Gulf, 2) 100 days of the Iranian regime claiming that they’re the ‘resistance’ and they have ‘courage’ and whatever propaganda they can produce from the already stated fact that the United States has all the guns right now and 3) it’s 100 days of roller coasting headlines about the Iran war being the right thing to do or not. The markets follow suit, they have gone up and down in insane ways in the past three months and it’s not hard to imagine that whoever can predict what the headlines are going to say, is becoming quite rich about it. And since Trump is basically the main driver of headlines... well, even if you’re a Trump supporter you know there’s a huge conflict of interest in the [ generate tension -> headlines -> markets ] chain that Trump basically dominates.

Because, regardless of the outcome of the main topic of this war (Iran dropping their nuke dreams), this is going to have an actual impact in the November midterms. And Trump knows this. He’s still willing to go SLOW with Iran, and keep pushing for a deal, the same way he’s going slow with Venezuela. By the way, his latest remarks about Venezuela becoming a ‘very happy country’ and Venezuelans ‘very happy’, well, you know that message was certainly NOT for Venezuelans. That message is for Americans. Or, maybe Iranians. Because Venezuelans who are still in Venezuela have all the right to be pissed about every headline being about how ‘prosperous’ the local oil infrastructure is becoming and they’re worse than ever.

This is a good time to remind you that 1) I’m Venezuelan, 2) I don’t live in Venezuela and can’t return safely to the country and 3) I’ve always said that Trump was the miracle that the USA needed in 2024 and for my country, he’s been a net positive. I can’t expect, or no Venezuelan can expect 25+ years of corruption, drug cartels and terrorism hosting to be undone in a matter of months because I’ll tell you myself that the problem is not reds vs. blues. The problem in my country, is that reds AND most blues were on it all this time and that’s why the chavista-madurista machinery has stood for so long. Right now people want Delcy out but Delcy is the most pragmat-ish of the regime bunch so that’s the only channel Rubio can use to establish some sort of order. And that order is guaranteed by the gun pointing right at Delcy’s head, of course.

But I digress. Even so, the Venezuela example is not much different than the Iran situation. You can’t simply try to ‘glass Caracas’ and call it a day, because even if our military arm is not divided in 30 plus divisions like the IRGC, it was fractured enough to make the country absolutely ungovernable without cleaning the house first. And for Washington, a ‘clean’ Venezuela with actual elections is way more important than a regime-free Iran, because we’re in the same backyard. That’s why the Cuban regime is next.

You see, the Venezuela situation is complicated. The Iran situation is also complicated in its own way, and this is one of the reasons Trump can’t simply ‘finish the job’, because he knows that if he goes full Michael Bay on Iran, then forget about any sort of negotiation with them, and what is worse: Iran will make sure to hit back at the GCC countries, especially those who signed the Abraham Accords, not only with missiles and drones but with whatever proxies they can throw at them. And the GCC countries absolutely don’t want that. They want Iran to behave, yes; and they don’t want Iran to have nukes. In fact, nobody wants Iran to have nukes. It’s tragic what’s happening to Iranians, but in geopolitics you have to make pragmatic decisions in the best interest of your own citizens. And as long as the Iranian regime behaves (mostly) well, everyone will be OK with that.

The GCC countries understand the complexity of the situation, they want these matters to be settled, they know they NEED America’s support, and Trump knows he can’t just sweep-bomb the country. That’s why he pushes for a deal. Again and again. And that’s why he telegraphs that he’s about to hit Iran again. Maybe he will. Maybe he will actually take Kharg Island. I don’t think Iran has any capacity to retaliate against the United States or Israel, so the next best thing they can do is to inflict pain on their neighbors. I already wrote about that being the reason why they have been pummeling the UAE’s walls so hard, out of spite.

Which brings me to one thought: at this point it’s obvious that the Iranian regime REALLY, REALLY wants nukes. They’re willing to continue an asymmetric, attrition war to make sure that dream stays alive. Which in itself, should confirm what everyone thinks about them.

That’s why Trump keeps pushing for a deal. Not because he can’t land the finishing blow, but because in doing so he would precipitate a scenario way worse than the current one.

Last night an American Apache helicopter went into the water over the Strait of Hormuz. A robot boat, an actual uncrewed vessel, pulled both pilots out, which had never happened before in the entire history of people falling out of aircraft into oceans. This morning Trump blamed Iran for shooting it down and said America must respond. By this afternoon, American forces were striking Iranian military sites.

And in that same morning, before any of those strikes had landed, Trump told reporters the deal with Iran could still be signed in two or three days.

I want you to think about this for a second. A president stood in front of cameras and announced both retaliation against a country and a signing date with that same country, in the same session, with the same facial expression. I must confess that my first reaction was labeling this as a contradiction, but I have now watched enough of these to know that Trump is doing this exact thing to drive our attention away from two very critical calendars.

Israel votes at the end of October. America votes the first week of November. The two men running this war face their voters days apart, and they need the same waterway in opposite conditions. Trump needs the strait open and gasoline falling before Americans vote. Netanyahu needs the Iran question either thoroughly squashed or dramatically unresolved before Israelis vote, and since the ‘thoroughly squashed’ scenario was never really discussed by anyone, he’ll have to settle for keeping the conflict unresolved. Let me explain.

Because we’re talking about the same strait, same season, but two alarms set to opposite outcomes. But let’s take a look at their behavior instead.

Start with Trump. On Sunday night he called Netanyahu privately and asked him not to respond to Iran’s missiles. Israel struck anyway. Then Trump took his own private phone call and paraphrased his private call with Bibi. He told an Israeli journalist he had warned Netanyahu, quote, “Bibi, you better be careful, or you will be on your own very soon.” Then he repeated versions of it to reporters. Then again after a basketball game in New York, like a man determined to make sure the message reached everyone except the person it was addressed to.

There’s this thing about venting: a frustrated person does it once, in private, and feels better. Normal stuff. But Trump selected the single harshest sentence from a private call and personally hand-delivered it to three separate audiences across two days. That’s our signal. He is, very publicly, assembling a file labeled “I warned him, I asked him to stop, I gave him every chance,” and a man only assembles that file when he is preparing to do something he will need it for. You can call it an alibi, as well.

Now consider Netanyahu, whose situation is that of a man whose own war is being settled in a meeting he wasn’t even invited to. America negotiates with Iran through Pakistani and Qatari mediators, and Israel sits outside that room. A leader locked out of a negotiation has exactly one remaining way to participate in it, and that way is the battlefield. Every Israeli strike on Lebanon is meant for Hezbollah, yes; but functionally, it’s also a memo addressed to Washington, and every memo says the same thing: nothing gets signed without me.

This week his cabinet stopped pretending otherwise. His finance minister argued, on the record, for what he called the Beirut model: hit Beirut hard and keep the Lebanese front separate from the Iranian one. His national security minister announced the government cannot allow this deal to happen. And when that minister pushed for even more escalation, Netanyahu responded by suggesting the man was campaigning for the election.

So the main topic was not the Iran war, but the October elections.

The polls explain why. When Israelis were asked in April whether the Iran campaign had been a success, one in ten said yes. One in ten is a number normally reserved for questions like “do you trust airline coffee?” Two former prime ministers just merged their parties for the single purpose of removing Netanyahu, and his ultra-orthodox partners are furious over a draft law. So inventory his options. A signed deal hands his rivals the slogan “he let Iran win” right before the vote. An open war keeps him the indispensable man. The strikes are not a man losing the plot, but THE plot itself.

Two elections, days apart, pulling one strait in opposite directions. That is the machine running underneath everything you watched today.

In the following section, I am going to show you why today’s American strikes on Iran will not kill this deal, while one specific Israeli decision could. I will lay out the three ways this branches from here, what each branch does to the price of oil, and the single signal that tells you which branch we are on before the news does.

That signal has nothing to do with missiles. It sounds like this:

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By the close, Marvell had gained almost a third of its value in a single day. The stock finished at 290 dollars and change. It was the biggest one-day move in the company’s history. The market value swelled by roughly fifty-six billion dollars in an afternoon. That is more than many famous companies are worth in total, conjured out of one sentence from one man.

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Kuwait’s main airport was still quiet when Iran hit Terminal 1 without any warnings. A man died while thinking he was safe standing inside a civilian building meant for reunions and goodbyes, for travelers heading to family gatherings, weddings, new jobs and new experiences. A weapon launched from a country he had never touched, ended his morning and his life.

Dozens more were carried out hurt among the shattered glass, the fire climbing the walls and sirens replacing the boarding calls.

Far from the smoke, Donald Trump settled into a chair under soft studio lights and told an interviewer that the war was as good as over. Iran had already agreed to give up the bomb, he said. Calm. Certain. The voice of a man describing a deal that was all but signed.

How can both events be true at the same time?

A war can burn and wind down toward a handshake in the same breath. That impossible morning, where the weapons still fly while the deal gets drawn, is the whole Gulf right now. Once you see how both things stay true at once, everything else starts to make sense; and the best way to make sense of this mess is taking a good look at the UAE.

Back when this war opened in late February, Iran did not just hit American bases in Kuwait and Qatar and Bahrain. Iran put missiles into Al Dhafra, the big air base inside the United Arab Emirates. And Iran did not hide behind a militia in Yemen or a shadowy outfit in Iraq. The Revolutionary Guard put its own name on it. Sovereign Iran, firing on sovereign UAE, on purpose, in the open.

For years the smart-sounding take was that Iran would never dare strike the UAE directly. The story went that Iran only ever pokes the Emirates through proxies so it can shrug and say “Nah, you’re wrong, it was not us!” That story is dead. Iran crossed the line it was never supposed to cross.

But after weeks of ceasefire, Dubai is bustling again. The airport is moving people. The malls are full. The cranes are still up. The UAE kept selling its oil. The Emirates absorbed a direct hit from a sovereign neighbor and went back to business with a speed that should stop you cold, because it tells you something about how power actually works in 2026.

It tells you the thing everyone calls a red line was never a red line at all.

A red line is a rule. Rules get broken when somebody gets angry enough. Tehran proved that in February. What is actually keeping Abu Dhabi standing is not a rule and not a threat and not even the best missile shield money can buy, though the UAE has one of those too. What is keeping Abu Dhabi standing is something closer to physics.

Then came May. A drone slipped across the western border and lit a fire at the edge of the Barakah nuclear plant, the only nuclear station in the Arab world. No radiation leaked. The reactors kept running. But notice what the UAE did next: They didn’t name Iran. The UAE pointed at a drone that came in from the direction of Iraq and left the blame deliberately blurry.

So now you have two tracks running at once. On one track Iran fires openly and signs its name. On the other track a drone arrives from nowhere and nobody claims it. The Emirates take both kinds of hit and refuse to flip the table either way.

What happened to Kuwait was direct retaliation for the US Navy’s latest move in the Gulf. American forces had hit an Iranian ship and struck Revolutionary Guard sites on Qeshm Island, a small Iranian island guarding the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz, and they called it self-defense. Iran could not reach the warships that did it, so it reached for the country hosting American hardware instead. Kuwait was the mailbox. And here is the difference that matters: Kuwait cannot defend itself the way the UAE can. Worse, Iran aimed at a civilian terminal, not a base. Aiming at the place where families say goodbye is not a warning shot. It is a signal that Tehran is willing to escalate.

Because the deeper question is not why Iran would strike the UAE, or Kuwait, or Bahrain. The deeper question is why Iran cannot afford to finish the job, and why the UAE is quietly spending billions to make sure that stays true not just for oil, but for the thing that is about to matter more than oil.

Let me show you the math the Emirates are actually running, what it has to do with a channel narrower than a long drive across a city, and the one bet Abu Dhabi is placing on the next twenty years that almost nobody is naming yet:

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Everything he asked for in February is in that document. The Strait of Hormuz reopens, unrestricted, no tolls, no harassment, with Iran clearing its own mines inside thirty days. Iran gives up the highly enriched uranium that started all of this. There is a sixty day window to settle the rest. By every line he drew when the first bombs fell, this is a win, and it is the most significant thing to happen since the war began.

And he is sitting on it. A couple of days to think about it, was the word that came out of the room. Meanwhile Iran is still firing drones at the very strait it just promised to open, Kuwait spent the night scrambling its air defenses against missiles coming in over the Gulf, and all of it has the shape of a regime the people around Trump quietly wonder can hold itself together long enough to sign its own name.

You have watched a version of this before, in smaller rooms. The person who holds every card goes quiet and lets the other side sweat. That quiet costs him nothing and costs the other side everything, because every hour it holds, Tehran talks itself into a worse position. The silence is the move. Every day he does not sign, the price of his signature climbs.

So the real question was never whether he signs. He will, when it is worth the most. The question is what he is buying with the wait, and the answer is not in Tehran at all.

Look at who he spent the weekend calling. Not Iran. The Arab capitals. He spent it pressing Saudi Arabia to do the thing he has wanted since his first term, to come to the table with Israel and finish what the Abraham Accords started. Iran was never the point. The cornered regime, the reopened strait, the whole region holding its breath while one man decides, all of it is the most pressure he will ever have to move the piece he actually cares about, which is in Riyadh, not Tehran. He is not going to spend that pressure on a signature one day early.

That is the behavior. A man who refuses the thing he asked for is telling you the thing was never the point.

But the diplomacy is the half you can see. The half that reaches into your life, into your rent and your gas tank and the part of your savings you try not to look at, is happening somewhere quieter, while every camera in the world points at a twenty one mile strip of water.

Because oil is doing something it is not supposed to do. There is a shooting war in the Persian Gulf. The most important oil channel on earth has been blockaded for three months. And the price of oil just fell for the second month in a row. That is not how this story is supposed to go. And what oil is quietly doing right now is telling you what the next war gets fought over, once oil stops being the prize:

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Not “make good progress on Mars.” Not “land the first crew.” A million people, living up there, breathing, eating at food trucks, sharing memes and sipping lattes. And the clause is gloriously all-or-nothing, which is the part I keep turning over. Push the company to seven and a half trillion dollars and land only nine hundred thousand colonists, and he gets nothing. Zero. The contract just shrugs and waits.

Sit with that for a second, because it’s the most honest thing in the whole document. Nobody chains his entire fortune to the single most ridiculous milestone on the menu unless one of two things is true. Either he fully intends to get there. Or he has understood something about belief that the rest of us keep refusing to learn.

The economists picked the second-most-interesting reading and have been shouting it all spring. The whole thing is smoke. SpaceX wants to be valued north of two trillion dollars on sales that wouldn’t crack the list of the hundred biggest American companies, the kind of price tag that makes a Wall Street analyst’s eye start twitching. Bolted onto it is an AI business losing money faster every quarter. The major networks called it the most leveraged bet of the decade, and then, with a perfectly straight face, set aside nearly a third of the shares for ordinary people’s savings. On the math, every word of that is correct.

And that is exactly why they’re about to miss the story.

Peter Thiel, who actually sat across a table from Musk back in the PayPal days, has one hard rule he repeats like a man who learned it the expensive way. Never bet against Elon Musk, in anything. It sounds like a fan-club slogan until you notice it’s really just accounting. Every short-seller who ever called him a fraud was reading the same spreadsheet the economists are reading right now, and every one of them got carried out feet-first. Because the spreadsheet was never the thing being sold. The belief is the thing being sold.

You can watch the whole trick in a single rock. There’s an asteroid out past Mars worth, on paper, thousands of times more than the entire world economy. On paper. And every analyst who runs that delicious number also writes the very next sentence, which is that the moment you actually haul the metal home and sell it, the price collapses and the fortune evaporates in your hands. The number is real and self-cancelling at the same time. Musk doesn’t need the asteroid to pay off. He needs you to believe it might. That gap, between the impossible number and your belief in it, is the engine under everything the man has ever built.

Which brings us back to that contract, and the second prize hiding inside it, the one that should make anyone in energy or markets sit up straight. Right next to the Mars clause sits another, and Musk collects only if he ends up running data centers in orbit pushing a hundred terawatts of computing. A hundred thousand nuclear reactors’ worth of compute, humming away in space, above your head. He isn’t alone in the dream. Jeff Bezos, asked last week whether orbital data centers are real, said yes, they’re coming, just not on the giddy three-year timeline (Bezos has his own fifty-thousand-satellite version in the works, so he’s hardly a neutral witness). Blue Origin has filed to launch more than fifty thousand computing satellites. SpaceX has filed for up to a million. The logic is brutally simple. The sun never sets up there, space cools the machines for free, and there is no city council in orbit to file a complaint about the noise.

Compute is the new oil. And if these men are right, the new oilfields aren’t under anyone’s soil. They’re ABOVE it. Musk has written the address of the next century’s wealth straight into his own paycheck, and the address is orbit.

But the Mars clause isn’t the tell. The orbital compute isn’t the tell either. The real tell is the quiet decision Musk has already made about where he builds the parts of this empire that America won’t let him build at home, and once you see it, you can’t unsee where the money is about to go:

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On May 26, while every camera in the world was pointed at a twenty-one-mile stretch of water in the Persian Gulf, the most important repricing of the year happened somewhere quieter. A company most people have never heard of crossed a trillion dollars in value in a single afternoon. It jumped roughly 19% in one session and added about $160 billion, more than most countries are worth, in the time it takes to watch a movie. It does not pump oil, ship it, or refine it. It makes the one thing the entire AI race cannot buy enough of.

To see why that number matters, look at what Trump spent the rest of the year doing, because he spent it fighting over the old scarce resource in three separate theaters, three different ways, and the market handed him the same answer every time.

In January, US forces seized Nicolás Maduro and took control of the country sitting on the largest proven oil reserves on earth, close to four times what the United States holds. “We built Venezuela’s oil industry,” Trump said, “and the socialist regime stole it from us.” The United States took the country with the most oil in the world. And the price of oil fell. Brent slid toward $60, because the world is not short of oil, with new barrels pouring out of Brazil, Guyana, Argentina, and Texas.

In February, the US and Israel opened a war on Iran and killed the man who had run it for thirty-six years. Iran answered by doing the thing it had always threatened and never done. It closed the Strait of Hormuz, the channel that carries almost a fifth of the world’s oil. This time the price reacted, running to $138 a barrel in April. And then, the moment a ceasefire looked plausible and the strait looked likely to reopen, it started sliding back. Brent trades near $99 this week and is on track to close the month down. The biggest supply shock in years produced a spike that is already deflating.

Then this month, the strangest move of all. Xi Jinping, the largest buyer of discounted Iranian and Venezuelan crude on the planet, got on a call with Trump, said the strait had to stay open, came out against any toll to use it, and offered to buy American oil instead. The hungriest customer for the cheap barrels turned toward the expensive, reliable ones. When your fiercest rival starts shopping for your product, the product has stopped being the prize.

Three theaters, one verdict, delivered three separate times. Seizing the largest reserve on earth could not lift the price. A war and a sealed strait lifted it for a few weeks. And the world’s hungriest buyer is now shopping for stability instead of scarcity. The oil wars are real. The oil scarcity is not.

Here is the dot that matters. The instinct driving all three moves is the oldest one in great-power politics: control the scarce resource at its source, and you control everyone downstream of it. Trump has that instinct aimed at oil. The market just told him, three separate times, that oil is not the scarce thing anymore. The scarce thing is what that trillion-dollar company makes, and its chokepoint is far tighter than any strait. Only three companies on earth can produce it. Two of them sit in a single dangerous neighborhood, and the one that crossed a trillion dollars this week is the only one of the three that answers to Washington:

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Start with what almost nobody outside the energy world noticed. When Iran went looking for targets in this war, it did not only go after ships. It went after Qatar. The strike on Ras Laffan, the largest liquefied natural gas facility on the planet, took out roughly a sixth of Qatar’s export capacity in a single blow. Qatar is the third largest gas exporter on Earth. The repair estimates are not measured in weeks. They run three to five years. And the gas that was flowing out of Ras Laffan was not headed to Iran’s enemies in the abstract. It was contracted to Italy, to Belgium, to South Korea, to China. Four economies just lost a chunk of their heating, their factories, and their power generation, and there is no quick way to get it back.

Here is the part that makes this different from the oil shock everyone remembers from a few years ago. Oil is fungible and oil floats. If a barrel cannot come from one place, it can usually come from another, at a price. Natural gas does not work that way. To move gas across an ocean you have to chill it into a liquid, load it onto a specialized ship, sail it to a specialized terminal, and turn it back into gas at the other end. You cannot reroute that overnight, and you cannot conjure a new terminal in a season. When a major source goes offline, the countries that depended on it do not pay a little more. They go without.

So they are going without. The International Energy Agency has called this the single greatest energy security challenge in its history, and the response on the ground backs up the language. By the latest tracking, at least sixty countries have enacted close to two hundred emergency energy measures. Driving bans. Fuel rationing. Shortened school weeks and closed universities. Work from home orders issued not for a virus but to keep the grid from buckling. This is not happening in one unlucky region. It is happening across Asia, across parts of Europe, and across the developing economies that sit at the back of the line whenever supply gets tight.

And watch what those countries are reaching for when the gas runs short. They are reaching for coal. At least eight nations are now burning more coal or delaying the retirement of plants they had promised to close, and the list is not made up of the usual suspects alone. It includes Japan. It includes South Korea. It includes Germany and Italy. A decade of climate commitments is being quietly walked backward in a single year, because a country facing a dark winter will choose the dirty fuel it can actually get over the clean one it cannot. The lesson that every energy minister on Earth is absorbing right now is brutal and simple. Climate policy is what you do when the lights are on. Survival is what you do when they are not.

The street level picture is the part that does not make the front page. Pakistan dropped its highway speed limits to save fuel. Bangladesh asked its own citizens to switch off unnecessary lights. Laos pushed workers home. Across Southeast Asia, drivers have pulled into stations to find the diesel simply gone. None of these countries is at war. None of them fired a shot. They are just downstream of a chokepoint on the other side of the world, and the chokepoint moved.

This is the real shape of power in 2026, and it is worth saying plainly. The age of armies marching across borders to take territory is not how the strongest players are operating anymore. The move now is quieter and far more effective. You do not need to occupy a country if you can decide whether its lights turn on. Iran understood this when it drew a map instead of firing a missile. The United States understood it when it chose to choke fuel rather than land troops. The whole world is now being sorted into two groups, and the sorting is happening fast: the handful of players who can route energy around any chokepoint and keep their own lights on, and everyone else, who is learning in real time what it feels like to depend on a switch somebody else controls.

That sorting is the most important thing happening in the global economy right now, and it is quietly creating a very specific set of winners. Not the countries caught in the dark. The companies that sit on the right side of the switch.

Below the line, I lay out exactly who those are, with the names and the tickers, in five groups. The American exporters who became the world’s gas lifeline the moment Qatar went offline. The shippers earning more for the same fleet now that every cargo sails the long way around. The underwriters in London quietly collecting the war premium on every tanker that dares the strait, and the one catch in that trade most people will miss. The single cleanest way to own the UAE bypass build-out I talked about in the video, even though the pipeline itself is not for sale. And the defense names restocking the missiles the blockade is burning through. I also flag which of these is already crowded and overpriced, and the one I think the market has not woken up to yet. Here is who is positioned, and why:

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That reading is wrong on every count.

Trump walked into Beijing with a public offer for ten of China’s largest tech companies:Alibaba, ByteDance, Tencent, JD-dot-com, Lenovo, Foxconn, and four others, to buy Nvidia H200 chips. The press treated it as a concession. It was nothing of the kind.

The H200 is not America’s most advanced AI chip. The B200 and the upcoming GB300 are, and Chinese companies remain completely banned from buying either one. The H200 sits one generation back. And the offer came attached to Presidential Proclamation 11002 from January 14, a 25% Section 232 tariff on advanced AI accelerators, with the H200 named specifically in the document. The actual offer to those ten Chinese firms was: permission to buy a second-tier chip, at full market price, plus an American 25% tax on top.

Trump didn’t give Xi a gift. He threw yesterday’s tomatoes on the floor and watched Xi decide whether to pick them up.

Xi couldn’t. And the reason is the part most Western analysts will not say out loud.

Beijing’s domestic chip alternative, the Huawei Ascend, has reported yield rates around 40%. Six out of every ten wafers off the production line go to the scrap pile. Every senior Chinese technologist knows it. So does every CEO of every company on that list of ten. They have been quietly begging for export-control relief for two years.

So Xi had a choice. Accept American silicon publicly, and admit, in front of the entire Chinese internet, that the Chinese Communist Party cannot build the chip it has spent a decade promising. Or refuse, and keep his data centers running on a chip that breaks more than half the time it comes off the line.

In Beijing, losing face is the actual currency the regime runs on.

Xi refused. The Trojan Horse worked exactly as designed: the gift forced the recipient to expose his own constraint by the act of declining it. And Trump (who flattered Xi throughout the trip, the warmth, the “eleven years almost twelve years,” the “incredible visit”) made the refusal cost-free for both sides. Xi declined without insulting Trump. Trump offered without spending leverage. Both walked out looking like winners.

Only one of them actually was.

The same playbook ran in a second theater the same week. Iran cannot publicly accept Trump’s no-nukes ultimatum: forty years of “Death to America” rhetoric makes a direct surrender politically impossible for Tehran. So Trump is not negotiating with the Ayatollah. He is negotiating with the Gulf states: the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, who can deliver his terms back to Tehran as a regional settlement rather than a Western victory. Same mechanic. Two capitals. One week.

What Xi actually wanted from Beijing was not chips. It was relief on the sanctions targeting Chinese companies that buy Iranian crude. Reporting from the summit confirms the two leaders discussed it. The deal couldn’t close, because every road through Iran runs into the same wall, no nukes, and that wall is held up by the Gulf, which is leaning on Tehran, which only stabilizes if Beijing helps lean harder. Xi cannot help himself unless he helps Trump first.

Beijing knows it. That is why China spent 2025 adding 500 terawatt-hours of new electricity generation (solar alone added 340) and currently has 27 nuclear reactors under construction. Alibaba just formed a joint venture with China National Nuclear Power specifically to provide dedicated electricity for AI data centers. Beijing is not building this because it cares about the environment; it is building because compute is the new oil and the indigenization clock is running.

But chip independence runs into a constraint Beijing cannot manufacture its way out of: rare earths. China controls roughly 70% of global mining and 90% of all processing. The Pentagon has spent the past year quietly building the alternative… and the compliance deadline is closer than the markets have noticed. Less than eight months. The dated catalysts, the named companies, the structural reality nobody is putting in print, and what to look for in the next 8 months is right here:

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