But, Prof G never answered the question of why stock markets are at a record high? Is Scott shorting the market or not? Or has his February high tech boycott already done too much damage?
Ah yes, the classic “everything is about to collapse” thesis—always a crowd favorite. If you read this piece too quickly, you’d think we’re about three missed container shipments away from returning to bartering goats and arguing over sacks of grain.
Let’s inject a little reality.
First, global markets—those cold, profit-driven, hyper-informed machines—are not exactly panicking. In fact, they’re brushing this off like a minor inconvenience. That’s not because traders are clueless; it’s because they’ve seen this movie before. Supply shocks happen. Routes reroute. Prices spike, then normalize. The system bends—rarely breaks.
Second, the idea that one chokepoint disruption equals global famine ignores something important: adaptation. Fertilizer doesn’t magically disappear—it gets repriced, redirected, and substituted. Same with helium, plastics, shipping, you name it. Painful? Sure. Apocalyptic? Hardly.
Third, invoking the French Revolution every time food prices tick up is a bit theatrical. Yes, food insecurity can destabilize regions—but jumping from “higher fertilizer costs” to “global conflict spiral” is like predicting a house fire because someone lit a candle.
And this “end of globalization” angle? We’ve heard it after every crisis—2008, COVID, Ukraine. Yet here we are, still trading, still shipping, still optimizing.
Bottom line: this isn’t a “slow-motion famine machine.” It’s a messy, uneven, but ultimately resilient global system doing what it always does—adjusting under pressure.
Helium cannot be substituted in EUV lithography that allows the most advanced semiconductors to be manufactured and is the most critical part of the process Every single one of ASML's advanced machines rely on it exclusively for cooling and its inert gas characteristics "Helium is currently considered irreplaceable in advanced semiconductor fabrication, with no viable, large-scale substitutes for its critical cooling and carrier gas roles, particularly in EUV lithography." You can look it up. The same is true for rare earths. I agree with you that markets can adjust through repricing and substitutes, as long as substitutes actually exist-which sometimes they do not.
The concern is a free and open Straight of Hormuz that has used for $$$ extorsion by the IRGC to operate and Prof G screaming the sky is falling ... shipping vessels are passing through albeit at a slower pace and escorted by the US military ... rare earth mineral mining is in its infancy and within 50 years the US will dominnate
Scott, as an aging man who relies heavily on MRIs, helium balloons at grandkid birthdays, and the occasional squeaky-voice gag to stay relevant, I take this helium news personally. Between the strait and my prostate, nothing flows like it used to.
What’s interesting is that “freedom of navigation” gets framed as a neutral principle, but in practice it looks a lot like selective enforcement by the actors with the capability to enforce it. The idea is universal, the application isn’t.
That creates a real tension. When a dominant power conducts these operations, is it upholding a rules-based system or reinforcing its own version of it? Smaller states benefit from open sea lanes, but they also have no say in how or when those rules get tested.
The uncomfortable question is whether this system actually depends on asymmetry. If no single actor had the capacity to enforce these norms, do they persist or do they slowly erode into de facto territorial control?
I'm struck by the disconnect: you are so articulate about systematic oppression, yet you refuse to apply that insight to Israel’s campaign in Gaza and the West Bank. Or it's action in this conflict.
The underly narrative that Iran acted in a vacuum ignores the prior "act of war" that provoked its response. Ironically, this was taken to preempt the acquisition of the very weapons the US/Israel now threaten to use. Legally, the Strait of Hormuz is Iranian territorial water, not international. Iran is within its rights to blockade hostile vessels. The US "rules-based order" has been a farce to most people in the global south and Europe and Canada are waking up to this reality.
This piece is thinly veiled jingoism, manufacturing consent for a broader, potentially nuclear conflict by casually justifying the mass killing of civilians, children, pets and the erasure of culture and history in a mushroom cloud. Go to Hiroshima if you have not already and feel it for yourself.
Lastly - killing diplomats, political leaders and their families is not policing; it's gangsterism. Perhaps instead of preaching it is time for Americans and Israelis to have some introspection: what will it take for people to come out and demand regime change?
Hogwash. If the case, a thoughtful approach then would be to develop a comprehensive military plan with allies. As has been war games by previous administrations starting with Reagan. Or perhaps utilize the diplomatic route that would hold Iran to below 5% uranium enrichment and require IAEA inspectors on the ground to verify. And maybe even have the Iranian Ayatollah issue a religious fatwa banning the development of a nuclear weapon. Like we had with JPCOA
Exactly - by killing the only Iranian leader who expressly issued a fatwa against nuclear weapons both Israel and US only strengthened the hardliners against the many millions of everyday people that are suffering. US intervention in Afghanistan against the Soviets is exactly how the Taliban came to power and again common people suffered. Looking at Ukraine and Russia it becomes clear that giving up nuclear deterrence is kicking the can down the road. It's the only way for middle powers to put up a 'do not disturb' sign.
I'd bet my salary that the Pentagon has had a plan for going to war with Iran for 80 years. And that strategy constantly updated. And I'd be my house that that strategy included contingencies for the closure of the straits (or gays) of hormuz.
So, this isn't Trump. And maybe the strategy is playing out exactly as it's planned. (I might bet $100 on this...Not more)
But some people have the need to react quickly to slow moving events and miss the bigger picture
"Forms of political messaging and campaigning need to be created and sustained that make populism’s failures in government feel more important to more people, and that connect these failures more clearly to populism’s fundamentals – its fantasies about restoring lost golden ages, its delusions that foreigners are always to blame. In short, populism needs to be held to account." Read the whole article, Rightwing populism is littered with broken promises. Its opponents need to make those failures count by Andy Beckett at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/apr/24/rightwing-populism-littered-broken-promises-trump-farage-immigration
“A decade later we took on the British empire to stop it from kidnapping American citizens and forcing them to serve aboard its ships.”
Is this, err, a description of The War of 1812? If so, the mind boggles. Maybe Germany really did invade Poland to defend itself preemptively against Polish aggression. The same logic applies.
It’s annoying having to listen to stupid assholes that already have rationalized and contradicted themselves repeatedly, now mansplain why this isn’t such a bad thing… Hey, stupid fucks: you don’t sound rational when you say idiotic things to rationalize the dumpster fire that is this administration: you sounds like the typical weak minded idiot that doesn’t realize you’re the dumb fuck in the room
Where is George Hahn reading these each week. Is that not allowed on Substack? I very much enjoy him reading these vs the ai voice that reads them because they are only a text post on Substack.
Why can’t we have George Hahn reading these on Substack. Is that only available on the Prof G podcast feed???
What you leave out is the necessity to stop a terrorist regime in Iran from building up a ballistic missile capability that was approaching the point of out lasting any allied response. This would allow the regime to pursue nuclear weapons with impunity; continue to feed its proxies (Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis and Iraqi Hezbollah) and subjugate its own citizens.
Now there is a chance of regime change and peace among Arab states and
Israel, which every President has tried and failed.
Early on in Trumps second term someone described all the “spheres of influence” actions like Greenland, support for Russia, wanting Canada as a state, tariffs, etc as a lesson in how to go from a world power to a regional power in 12 months or less. It’s got to be the largest own goal in modern history (maybe longer).
I agree with the main point: freedom of navigation matters. If shipping lanes turn into toll roads run by hostile regimes, the whole world gets poorer and more dangerous fast. But that’s why your framing seems off to me.
You lay out all the damage from a disrupted Strait of Hormuz: energy shocks, fertilizer shortages, food inflation, helium problems, medical strain, famine risk, political instability. Fair enough. Those are real consequences.
But then most of the blame lands on Trump and America. That feels backward.
Iran isn’t some abstract “crisis.” It’s a regime making deliberate choices. If it’s turning an international waterway into a toll booth, threatening ships, and using commerce as leverage, that’s not just market disruption. That’s gangsterism. And gangsterism doesn’t happen because someone resists it. It happens when everyone decides to live with it.
Your own argument basically proves the need for enforcement. A toll booth in Hormuz won’t stay in Hormuz. China is watching. Russia is watching. Every country with missiles, mines, drones, or a navy is watching. If the world accepts this once, why wouldn’t it spread?
That’s why America has historically defended freedom of navigation. Not because we’re perfect. We’re not. But because open seas don’t stay open because people admire the idea. They stay open because someone has the power and will to keep them open. So the question isn’t whether the consequences are serious. They clearly are. The question is: who caused this, and who is willing to stop it?
You can’t praise freedom of navigation in theory while treating its enforcement like the greater evil. A world without American sea power doesn’t become more peaceful. It becomes more coercive, more transactional, and more dangerous.
That’s not restraint. That’s surrender with better vocabulary.
You know a time when Iran, as malevolent as its regime is, had 97% less enriched uranium than it does now? 2016, after the Iran nuclear deal was consummated. Trump jettisoned that deal in 2018, and Iran immediately began sprinting towards 20% enrichment on tons of uranium, which can easily be further refined to 60%, a couple hundred pounds of which is enough to yield a nuclear weapon. Israel has already decimated Iranian proxies, Iran had never been weaker prior to the war.
The fact that the Iranian government are gangsters is well-known to all and should have been taken into account when planning this dangerous, poorly-justified, and strategically incoherent initial attack. I actually supported the one-time sortie last summer. But this is bad planning by people who don't know what the hell they're doing. And who is negotiating for the US? Trump's buddy Witkoff and his callow son-in-law who is simultaneously taking billions from the Saudis in graft and corrupt investments.
When was the Strait of Hormuz actually open? Well, for the entire 47 years of Iran's theocratic and repressive regime before Trump started a war of choice with them. Trump has handed them a weapon that they can continue to brandish indefinitely. Every serious military strategist warned him about this vulnerability, but he knew better so chose to ignore them. It would be just like Venezuela. We have in recent history stumbled through 10+ years of war in Iraq, a country with half the population of Iran, which has 90M people and is the size of Western Europe. To argue that Iran was any imminent threat whatsoever to the US is laughable.
The Trump administration is absolutely to blame here for two reasons. First, they abandoned an imperfect but workable treaty that took 18 months to negotiate, had the backing of the EU, China, and Russia (to keep the Iranians in check), and then "solved" the problem that they themselves caused. Second, they chose to attack Iran in force despite Iran posing no real threat to the US. Trump is once again claiming credit for "solving" the Strait of Hormuz closure (hint-it's not solved, not even close), which his own actions precipitated. Not gaming out what your enemy may do and putting place contingencies to counter them is unforgivable. Trump and company are just making shit up as they go along.
Your argument assumes the Iran deal bought real security. I don’t buy that.
At best, it bought a temporary pause on one lane of Iran’s behavior while giving the regime access to money, legitimacy, and breathing room. And yes, I know the fact-check answer: it was not literally “Obama handed Iran $150 billion in cash.” Much of it involved access to previously frozen Iranian assets and sanctions relief. Fine. But money is fungible. If a regime gets financial breathing room on one side, it can spend more freely on the other. Even defenders of the deal admitted terrorism and missile sanctions had to remain because Iran’s behavior outside the nuclear file was still a major problem.
So I reject the idea that we “paid for time” in any morally clean or strategically brilliant sense. We subsidized a regime that kept funding proxies, building missiles, threatening Israel, destabilizing the region, and putting Americans in the crosshairs. Treasury and State have repeatedly tied Iranian financial networks and Iran-backed militias to terrorism, attacks on U.S. personnel, and destabilizing activity.
That is the part your argument glides past. You're treating the JCPOA like it put Iran in a box. It put Iran on layaway. The regime did not become less apocalyptic. It became better funded, better legitimized, and more patient.
And even if I granted that Trump’s withdrawal was badly handled, that still doesn't answer the Hormuz question. “Trump made a strategic mistake in 2018” is not a permission slip for Iran to turn one of the world’s most important waterways into a protection racket in 2026. Those are two different arguments. You can blame Trump for policy failure. Fine. But you still have to blame Iran for gangster behavior.
And I’m sorry, but “Hormuz was open for 47 years” is not the flex you think it is. It was open because Iran believed the cost of closing it would be too high. Sea lanes do not stay open because the ayatollahs are civic-minded maritime liberals. They stay open because someone with a navy makes extortion expensive. That's the entire point.
The JCPOA crowd wants to claim every month Iran waited as proof the deal worked, then blame everyone else the moment Iran does what Iran has always threatened to do. That's backwards.
Iran was never a normal negotiating partner. It was a hostage-taking, proxy-funding, death-to-America regime with a uranium program. The fact that they wore a suit at the negotiating table didn't make them less gangster. It meant the gangster had a pen. So no, I don’t accept the premise that this all started when Trump “provoked” an otherwise contained Iran.
Iran has been at war with the West through proxies for decades. The only question is whether we admit it or keep pretending the check cleared because peace was purchased.
The NYT published a chart of the buildup of uranium in Iran since we exited the deal in 2018 this morning, showing that Iran's holdings of uranium, including highly enriched 60% uranium, went up 20-fold after the exit from the deal. IRan was exporting 97% of the low-grade uranium it produced from 2015-2018. The question is simple--which situation is more dangerous to the region and the world? I didn't assert that it all started when Trump bombed Iran, I said he made fundamental strategic errors--not the same argument.
I'm not enamored by the Iranian regime, and they have caused significant regional security issues for a long time. The idea that solving those security issues would be accomplished by an intensive aerial bombardment with no ground troops worked just as well as it did in Libya, Bosnia, Vietnam, and countless other military failures. Going to war without accounting for what your opponent might do in response is, well, stupid and unforgivable, especially when our soldiers and civilian lives are on the line, and a lesson the US should have learned long ago--virtually all military planners assert this as an axiom, from Sun Tzu onward.
But, Prof G never answered the question of why stock markets are at a record high? Is Scott shorting the market or not? Or has his February high tech boycott already done too much damage?
Ah yes, the classic “everything is about to collapse” thesis—always a crowd favorite. If you read this piece too quickly, you’d think we’re about three missed container shipments away from returning to bartering goats and arguing over sacks of grain.
Let’s inject a little reality.
First, global markets—those cold, profit-driven, hyper-informed machines—are not exactly panicking. In fact, they’re brushing this off like a minor inconvenience. That’s not because traders are clueless; it’s because they’ve seen this movie before. Supply shocks happen. Routes reroute. Prices spike, then normalize. The system bends—rarely breaks.
Second, the idea that one chokepoint disruption equals global famine ignores something important: adaptation. Fertilizer doesn’t magically disappear—it gets repriced, redirected, and substituted. Same with helium, plastics, shipping, you name it. Painful? Sure. Apocalyptic? Hardly.
Third, invoking the French Revolution every time food prices tick up is a bit theatrical. Yes, food insecurity can destabilize regions—but jumping from “higher fertilizer costs” to “global conflict spiral” is like predicting a house fire because someone lit a candle.
And this “end of globalization” angle? We’ve heard it after every crisis—2008, COVID, Ukraine. Yet here we are, still trading, still shipping, still optimizing.
Bottom line: this isn’t a “slow-motion famine machine.” It’s a messy, uneven, but ultimately resilient global system doing what it always does—adjusting under pressure.
Doom sells. Reality adapts.
Helium cannot be substituted in EUV lithography that allows the most advanced semiconductors to be manufactured and is the most critical part of the process Every single one of ASML's advanced machines rely on it exclusively for cooling and its inert gas characteristics "Helium is currently considered irreplaceable in advanced semiconductor fabrication, with no viable, large-scale substitutes for its critical cooling and carrier gas roles, particularly in EUV lithography." You can look it up. The same is true for rare earths. I agree with you that markets can adjust through repricing and substitutes, as long as substitutes actually exist-which sometimes they do not.
The concern is a free and open Straight of Hormuz that has used for $$$ extorsion by the IRGC to operate and Prof G screaming the sky is falling ... shipping vessels are passing through albeit at a slower pace and escorted by the US military ... rare earth mineral mining is in its infancy and within 50 years the US will dominnate
Scott, as an aging man who relies heavily on MRIs, helium balloons at grandkid birthdays, and the occasional squeaky-voice gag to stay relevant, I take this helium news personally. Between the strait and my prostate, nothing flows like it used to.
What’s interesting is that “freedom of navigation” gets framed as a neutral principle, but in practice it looks a lot like selective enforcement by the actors with the capability to enforce it. The idea is universal, the application isn’t.
That creates a real tension. When a dominant power conducts these operations, is it upholding a rules-based system or reinforcing its own version of it? Smaller states benefit from open sea lanes, but they also have no say in how or when those rules get tested.
The uncomfortable question is whether this system actually depends on asymmetry. If no single actor had the capacity to enforce these norms, do they persist or do they slowly erode into de facto territorial control?
Prof,
I'm struck by the disconnect: you are so articulate about systematic oppression, yet you refuse to apply that insight to Israel’s campaign in Gaza and the West Bank. Or it's action in this conflict.
The underly narrative that Iran acted in a vacuum ignores the prior "act of war" that provoked its response. Ironically, this was taken to preempt the acquisition of the very weapons the US/Israel now threaten to use. Legally, the Strait of Hormuz is Iranian territorial water, not international. Iran is within its rights to blockade hostile vessels. The US "rules-based order" has been a farce to most people in the global south and Europe and Canada are waking up to this reality.
This piece is thinly veiled jingoism, manufacturing consent for a broader, potentially nuclear conflict by casually justifying the mass killing of civilians, children, pets and the erasure of culture and history in a mushroom cloud. Go to Hiroshima if you have not already and feel it for yourself.
Lastly - killing diplomats, political leaders and their families is not policing; it's gangsterism. Perhaps instead of preaching it is time for Americans and Israelis to have some introspection: what will it take for people to come out and demand regime change?
Slow thinking takes into consideration why this war began and the danger of letting Iran continue to build its missiles and nuclear weapons.
Hogwash. If the case, a thoughtful approach then would be to develop a comprehensive military plan with allies. As has been war games by previous administrations starting with Reagan. Or perhaps utilize the diplomatic route that would hold Iran to below 5% uranium enrichment and require IAEA inspectors on the ground to verify. And maybe even have the Iranian Ayatollah issue a religious fatwa banning the development of a nuclear weapon. Like we had with JPCOA
Exactly - by killing the only Iranian leader who expressly issued a fatwa against nuclear weapons both Israel and US only strengthened the hardliners against the many millions of everyday people that are suffering. US intervention in Afghanistan against the Soviets is exactly how the Taliban came to power and again common people suffered. Looking at Ukraine and Russia it becomes clear that giving up nuclear deterrence is kicking the can down the road. It's the only way for middle powers to put up a 'do not disturb' sign.
Dream on.
I'd bet my salary that the Pentagon has had a plan for going to war with Iran for 80 years. And that strategy constantly updated. And I'd be my house that that strategy included contingencies for the closure of the straits (or gays) of hormuz.
So, this isn't Trump. And maybe the strategy is playing out exactly as it's planned. (I might bet $100 on this...Not more)
But some people have the need to react quickly to slow moving events and miss the bigger picture
Great stuff Scott!
"Forms of political messaging and campaigning need to be created and sustained that make populism’s failures in government feel more important to more people, and that connect these failures more clearly to populism’s fundamentals – its fantasies about restoring lost golden ages, its delusions that foreigners are always to blame. In short, populism needs to be held to account." Read the whole article, Rightwing populism is littered with broken promises. Its opponents need to make those failures count by Andy Beckett at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/apr/24/rightwing-populism-littered-broken-promises-trump-farage-immigration
“A decade later we took on the British empire to stop it from kidnapping American citizens and forcing them to serve aboard its ships.”
Is this, err, a description of The War of 1812? If so, the mind boggles. Maybe Germany really did invade Poland to defend itself preemptively against Polish aggression. The same logic applies.
It’s annoying having to listen to stupid assholes that already have rationalized and contradicted themselves repeatedly, now mansplain why this isn’t such a bad thing… Hey, stupid fucks: you don’t sound rational when you say idiotic things to rationalize the dumpster fire that is this administration: you sounds like the typical weak minded idiot that doesn’t realize you’re the dumb fuck in the room
Where is George Hahn reading these each week. Is that not allowed on Substack? I very much enjoy him reading these vs the ai voice that reads them because they are only a text post on Substack.
Why can’t we have George Hahn reading these on Substack. Is that only available on the Prof G podcast feed???
Who can explain it? Who can tell you why?
Fools give you reasons, wise men never try.
What you leave out is the necessity to stop a terrorist regime in Iran from building up a ballistic missile capability that was approaching the point of out lasting any allied response. This would allow the regime to pursue nuclear weapons with impunity; continue to feed its proxies (Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis and Iraqi Hezbollah) and subjugate its own citizens.
Now there is a chance of regime change and peace among Arab states and
Israel, which every President has tried and failed.
Early on in Trumps second term someone described all the “spheres of influence” actions like Greenland, support for Russia, wanting Canada as a state, tariffs, etc as a lesson in how to go from a world power to a regional power in 12 months or less. It’s got to be the largest own goal in modern history (maybe longer).
Scott,
I agree with the main point: freedom of navigation matters. If shipping lanes turn into toll roads run by hostile regimes, the whole world gets poorer and more dangerous fast. But that’s why your framing seems off to me.
You lay out all the damage from a disrupted Strait of Hormuz: energy shocks, fertilizer shortages, food inflation, helium problems, medical strain, famine risk, political instability. Fair enough. Those are real consequences.
But then most of the blame lands on Trump and America. That feels backward.
Iran isn’t some abstract “crisis.” It’s a regime making deliberate choices. If it’s turning an international waterway into a toll booth, threatening ships, and using commerce as leverage, that’s not just market disruption. That’s gangsterism. And gangsterism doesn’t happen because someone resists it. It happens when everyone decides to live with it.
Your own argument basically proves the need for enforcement. A toll booth in Hormuz won’t stay in Hormuz. China is watching. Russia is watching. Every country with missiles, mines, drones, or a navy is watching. If the world accepts this once, why wouldn’t it spread?
That’s why America has historically defended freedom of navigation. Not because we’re perfect. We’re not. But because open seas don’t stay open because people admire the idea. They stay open because someone has the power and will to keep them open. So the question isn’t whether the consequences are serious. They clearly are. The question is: who caused this, and who is willing to stop it?
You can’t praise freedom of navigation in theory while treating its enforcement like the greater evil. A world without American sea power doesn’t become more peaceful. It becomes more coercive, more transactional, and more dangerous.
That’s not restraint. That’s surrender with better vocabulary.
You know a time when Iran, as malevolent as its regime is, had 97% less enriched uranium than it does now? 2016, after the Iran nuclear deal was consummated. Trump jettisoned that deal in 2018, and Iran immediately began sprinting towards 20% enrichment on tons of uranium, which can easily be further refined to 60%, a couple hundred pounds of which is enough to yield a nuclear weapon. Israel has already decimated Iranian proxies, Iran had never been weaker prior to the war.
The fact that the Iranian government are gangsters is well-known to all and should have been taken into account when planning this dangerous, poorly-justified, and strategically incoherent initial attack. I actually supported the one-time sortie last summer. But this is bad planning by people who don't know what the hell they're doing. And who is negotiating for the US? Trump's buddy Witkoff and his callow son-in-law who is simultaneously taking billions from the Saudis in graft and corrupt investments.
When was the Strait of Hormuz actually open? Well, for the entire 47 years of Iran's theocratic and repressive regime before Trump started a war of choice with them. Trump has handed them a weapon that they can continue to brandish indefinitely. Every serious military strategist warned him about this vulnerability, but he knew better so chose to ignore them. It would be just like Venezuela. We have in recent history stumbled through 10+ years of war in Iraq, a country with half the population of Iran, which has 90M people and is the size of Western Europe. To argue that Iran was any imminent threat whatsoever to the US is laughable.
The Trump administration is absolutely to blame here for two reasons. First, they abandoned an imperfect but workable treaty that took 18 months to negotiate, had the backing of the EU, China, and Russia (to keep the Iranians in check), and then "solved" the problem that they themselves caused. Second, they chose to attack Iran in force despite Iran posing no real threat to the US. Trump is once again claiming credit for "solving" the Strait of Hormuz closure (hint-it's not solved, not even close), which his own actions precipitated. Not gaming out what your enemy may do and putting place contingencies to counter them is unforgivable. Trump and company are just making shit up as they go along.
Daniel,
Your argument assumes the Iran deal bought real security. I don’t buy that.
At best, it bought a temporary pause on one lane of Iran’s behavior while giving the regime access to money, legitimacy, and breathing room. And yes, I know the fact-check answer: it was not literally “Obama handed Iran $150 billion in cash.” Much of it involved access to previously frozen Iranian assets and sanctions relief. Fine. But money is fungible. If a regime gets financial breathing room on one side, it can spend more freely on the other. Even defenders of the deal admitted terrorism and missile sanctions had to remain because Iran’s behavior outside the nuclear file was still a major problem.
So I reject the idea that we “paid for time” in any morally clean or strategically brilliant sense. We subsidized a regime that kept funding proxies, building missiles, threatening Israel, destabilizing the region, and putting Americans in the crosshairs. Treasury and State have repeatedly tied Iranian financial networks and Iran-backed militias to terrorism, attacks on U.S. personnel, and destabilizing activity.
That is the part your argument glides past. You're treating the JCPOA like it put Iran in a box. It put Iran on layaway. The regime did not become less apocalyptic. It became better funded, better legitimized, and more patient.
And even if I granted that Trump’s withdrawal was badly handled, that still doesn't answer the Hormuz question. “Trump made a strategic mistake in 2018” is not a permission slip for Iran to turn one of the world’s most important waterways into a protection racket in 2026. Those are two different arguments. You can blame Trump for policy failure. Fine. But you still have to blame Iran for gangster behavior.
And I’m sorry, but “Hormuz was open for 47 years” is not the flex you think it is. It was open because Iran believed the cost of closing it would be too high. Sea lanes do not stay open because the ayatollahs are civic-minded maritime liberals. They stay open because someone with a navy makes extortion expensive. That's the entire point.
The JCPOA crowd wants to claim every month Iran waited as proof the deal worked, then blame everyone else the moment Iran does what Iran has always threatened to do. That's backwards.
Iran was never a normal negotiating partner. It was a hostage-taking, proxy-funding, death-to-America regime with a uranium program. The fact that they wore a suit at the negotiating table didn't make them less gangster. It meant the gangster had a pen. So no, I don’t accept the premise that this all started when Trump “provoked” an otherwise contained Iran.
Iran has been at war with the West through proxies for decades. The only question is whether we admit it or keep pretending the check cleared because peace was purchased.
It wasn’t. It was financed.
The NYT published a chart of the buildup of uranium in Iran since we exited the deal in 2018 this morning, showing that Iran's holdings of uranium, including highly enriched 60% uranium, went up 20-fold after the exit from the deal. IRan was exporting 97% of the low-grade uranium it produced from 2015-2018. The question is simple--which situation is more dangerous to the region and the world? I didn't assert that it all started when Trump bombed Iran, I said he made fundamental strategic errors--not the same argument.
I'm not enamored by the Iranian regime, and they have caused significant regional security issues for a long time. The idea that solving those security issues would be accomplished by an intensive aerial bombardment with no ground troops worked just as well as it did in Libya, Bosnia, Vietnam, and countless other military failures. Going to war without accounting for what your opponent might do in response is, well, stupid and unforgivable, especially when our soldiers and civilian lives are on the line, and a lesson the US should have learned long ago--virtually all military planners assert this as an axiom, from Sun Tzu onward.