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War On Iran: Trump Chickens Out – Who Lobbied For War – The Energy Dominance Aim
On Saturday U.S. president Donald Trump threatened to attack Iran’s electricity network and other infrastructure within 48 hours should it not reopen the Strait of Hormuz for all shipping:
“If Iran doesn’t FULLY OPEN, WITHOUT THREAT, the Strait of Hormuz, within 48 HOURS from this exact point in time, the United States of America will hit and obliterate their various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST!” Trump posted on social media around 7:45 p.m. EDT (2345 GMT) on Saturday.
Iran responded by threatening retaliation against the infrastructure of U.S. client states in the Gulf. Any such attack would have devastating consequences:
“If Iran’s fuel and energy infrastructure is attacked by the enemy, all energy infrastructure, as well as information technology…and water desalination facilities, belonging to the US and the regime in the region will be targeted pursuant to previous warnings,” Iranian military spokesman Ebrahim Zolfaqari said, according to state media.
On early Monday morning the markets reacted nervously. Treasuries, stocks and gold were all down.
As the markets threatened to tank, and shortly before the deadline Trump had given to Iran, he chickened out:
biggerI suspect, and Iranian sources confirm, that there have been no talks with Iran. Trump is inventing these talks to save himself from the catastrophic consequences any attempt to fulfill his threat would have entailed.
In five days, after the markets have closed for the week, Trump may well renew his threat.
—I had warned that, even if peace would happen today, it would still take many months to recover from oil and gas supply slumps. The Economist has made some calculations on how long it will it take for the oil and gas market to normalize:
Even the best-case scenario for energy markets is disastrous (archived)
Even if Donald Trump and Iran reached a deal to stop fighting tomorrow, it would thus be another four months before markets regained some semblance of normality. Producers elsewhere cannot crank up output fast enough to recover past losses. The result is to shave off some 3% of planned global oil production this year. Every month Ras Laffan stays shut, the world loses around 7m tonnes of lng—nearly 2% of projected annual supply. And full capacity will, owing to the latest strikes, be lower than before. The upshot is that production will fall 4% short of demand this year even if Qatar started pumping what it can today.
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Oil and gas traders are still banking on a spring miracle. The world is praying for one. But even if Mr Trump and Iran’s ayatollahs grant this wish, the logistics of oil and gas will not be easily appeased. Energy markets will be living with the war’s fallout well into northern winter.
My hunch is that these estimates are on the optimistic side of things.
—While crying crocodile tears over alleged innocent people sitting in jail in Iran the U.S. has been attacking prisons in Iran:
The Iranian Prisons Where Bombs Are Threatening Dissidents and Americans (archived) – WSJ
Airstrikes have damaged complexes used to hold political detainees, according to a Wall Street Journal visual investigation—putting their lives in danger
—A few more background pieces on how the war on Iran unfolded are coming out. It is hard to say how much these are myth-building or reality. Anyway – here is the gists of they are spreading:
Israel Thought It Could Spur Rebellion Inside Iran. That Hasn’t Happened. (archived) – NY Times
President Trump’s hopes that an Israeli plan to ignite an internal uprising against Iran’s theocratic government could bring the war to a swift end have so far been dashed.
Within days of the war’s beginning, said David Barnea, the Mossad chief, his service would likely be able to galvanize the Iranian opposition — igniting riots and other acts of rebellion that could even lead to the collapse of Iran’s government. Mr. Barnea also presented the proposal to senior Trump administration officials during a visit to Washington in mid-January.
Mr. Netanyahu adopted the plan. Despite doubts about its viability among senior American officials and some officials in other Israeli intelligence agencies, both he and President Trump seemed to embrace an optimistic outlook. Killing Iran’s leaders at the outset of the conflict, followed by a series of intelligence operations intended to encourage regime change, they thought, could lead to a mass uprising that might bring about a swift end to the war.
“Take over your government: It will be yours to take,” Mr. Trump told Iranians in his initial address at the war’s start, after saying they should first seek shelter from the bombing.
Three weeks into the war, an Iranian uprising has not yet materialized.
Trump’s Iran War Drive Exposes Limits of ‘Yes Sir’ Cabinet (archived) – Bloomberg
Those privately pressing Trump to strike Iran included Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, media mogul Rupert Murdoch and some conservative commentators, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. The News Corp. founder communicated with Trump several times as he urged the president to take on Tehran, according to one person briefed on their interactions.
Meanwhile, some of Trump’s closest advisers were more muted about the prospect of an armed conflict, including Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, the people said.
Few, if any, told him directly it was an ill-conceived idea. Wiles tried to ensure the president understood his options, the people said, while Vance urged top officials to speak candidly to the president and about the possibility of war. In private meetings before the attacks, Vance asked questions about how any war would work.
The above ‘blame Netanyahoo’ pieces are missing the big picture view. This war fits a long term U.S. strategy and thus had to happen:
America is Achieving Full-Spectrum Energy Dominance — And Nobody is Paying Attention
I have said it many times, and I will say it again: the United States does not lose wars. If it did, it would stop waging them. Whether Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, or Libya — failed states are not failures of Empire. They are the victories of Empire. And Empire is on a roll.
Now the same chorus rises over Iran. Left and right, the refrain is identical: this will be a disaster, America is overreaching, Iran will be its graveyard. The same voices. The same blindness. The same century-old script.
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Medhurst argues that the United States, far from stumbling into another disastrous West Asian quagmire, is executing a calculated seizure of the planet’s energy supply — and that the wars on Syria, Venezuela, Ukraine, and now Iran are not separate blunders but sequential steps toward a single goal: total energy dominance.
While energy dominance may be the over-arching aim Washington has there are doubts that it is achievable:
How the Iran war is turning America’s energy dominance into a mirage – The National
There are non-fossil energy alternatives coming up and penetrating the markets. Any attempt to monopolize fossil fuels and to ramp up its prices will increase the adoption of non-fossil alternatives and thereby defeat itself.
https://vtforeignpolicy.com/2026/03/iran-hits-us-dollar-in-the-heart/
The Middle East isn’t just a protracted war of planes, missiles, bombs, and drones with a hazy outcome.
Another war, much larger and with a clear outcome, is unfolding in parallel.
It is the war against the petrodollar, whose stake is the survival of the global financial order based on the American currency.
These ayatollahs may be dirty, ugly, and evil, but they are implementing a strategy of formidable impact against the heart of American power in the world, accelerating epochal changes that have long been simmering underground.
Iran is aware of its conventional military inferiority compared to the Atlantic superpower and has chosen not to fight it plane against plane, ship against ship, bomb against bomb.
Tehran isn’t aiming to win on the battlefield.
It has developed an asymmetric strategy aimed at striking the very core of globalized financial capitalism: the petrodollar.
The wealth generated by oil paid for in dollars and invested in the global financial system controlled by Wall Street and the US Treasury.
The petrodollar is not an abstract concept.
It is the mass of capital accumulated by Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia through decades of selling hydrocarbons on global markets.
The Gulf’s sovereign wealth funds manage assets estimated at between $11 and $13 trillion (US GDP $30 trillion).
The majority of this immense capital is invested in the US: in Treasury bonds, stocks listed on the New York stock exchange, real estate in major cities, private equity funds, and Wall Street hedge funds.
This system rests on three pillars.
The first is the production of gas, oil, and derivatives: the Persian Gulf contains approximately 48% of the world’s proven oil reserves, and 80% of the region’s oil output and approximately 20% of the world’s oil output passes through the Strait of Hormuz every day.The second pillar is payment in dollars: since 1974, by explicit agreement with Washington, Saudi Arabia and other producers have agreed to denominate their oil sales in dollars, giving rise to a permanent demand for the US currency.The third pillar is military protection: large bases with tens of thousands of soldiers spread between the entrance to Hormuz and Iraq—from Camp Doha in Kuwait to the mega-base at Al-Udeid in Qatar, from the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet stationed in Bahrain to the Al Dhafra base in the Emirates.
It’s a system of mutual reinforcement: oil is sold and laundered in dollars, and American soldiers protect the Gulf regimes from internal instability and external aggression.
A virtuous circle for Washington, a noose tightened around the neck of anyone who would challenge the dollar’s supremacy.
All three pillars are terribly wavering these days.
The horrendous, dirty, etc. aforementioned ayatollahs have clearly identified the system’s greatest weakness: the Gulf petro-monarchs’ confidence in America’s ability to protect their regimes, their industries, and their money.
This confidence began to wane in 2019 and dissolved in the first week of this war with Iranian attacks that devastated critical Gulf hydrocarbon production infrastructure without major obstacles and struck military bases thought to be invulnerable.
The closure of Hormuz completed the work.
A taste of what is happening, moreover, had already been provided in September 2019, when an Iranian drone attack operated by the Houthis knocked out 5% of global oil supply and caused the price of Brent crude to soar by more than 15% in a single session.
Today, a sustained attack, combined with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz using naval mines, coastal missiles, and submarines, could, according to the most conservative estimates, push the price of oil above $200 a barrel.
The consequences for the global economy could be brutal.
A doubling of the price per barrel could trigger a deep recession in importing industrialized economies, starting with Europe and Japan.
But the most serious damage would not be limited to the short term: it would be the beginning of the end of the petrodollar, and the dollar it consists of.
In the short term, the oil giants could record extraordinary profits.
War is good for the oil companies, but it is not good for the machinery that holds the whole thing together.
War is not good for the Gulf monarchies at all.
If they are militarily destabilized—their facilities hit, their very political survival threatened—the flow of capital that has been flowing from the Arabian Peninsula to Wall Street for decades could be interrupted and reversed.
Gulf sovereign wealth funds begin liquidating US assets to cover war expenses and rebuilding destroyed infrastructure.
US Treasury securities are being sold en masse on the open market.
The dollar is under downward pressure that the Federal Reserve cannot counteract by raising interest rates alone, because higher rates in an oil recession exacerbate the domestic economic crisis.
This is the scenario that economists like Michael Hudson have long predicted: the moment when the liquidation of dollar reserves by oil-producing countries triggers a systemic crisis of distrust in the US currency.
Not a controlled devaluation, but a flight from the dollar.
To where? The groundwork for this transition has already been carefully prepared in recent years.
In March 2023, Xi Jinping and Mohammed bin Salman signed a historic agreement in Beijing, with Saudi Arabia agreeing to receive payments in yuan for a growing share of its oil exports to China.
Beijing is already the Saudis’ largest customer, importing around 1.8 million barrels per day. As early as 2022, China launched the yuan-denominated oil futures contract on the Shanghai International Energy Exchange (INE), with the aim of creating an alternative pricing mechanism to London-based Brent and American WTI.
The logic is imperative: if the US is no longer able to guarantee the security of the Gulf regimes, diversifying its foreign exchange reserves becomes urgent.
The process is already underway: yuan reserves in the central banks of the Gulf countries have increased significantly over the past three years.
The BRICS+ framework agreement—which includes Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Iran, and Egypt—envisions the development of alternative forms of payment to the dollar for trade between member countries.
The Iranian attacks are shaking up the Gulf monarchies and accelerating this process.
The oil wealth that for fifty years has financed US deficits through the recycling of petrodollars is beginning to flow to Beijing, Shanghai, and emerging Asian markets.
The consequences of all this are epochal.
An America that loses the exorbitant privilege of the dollar as the global reserve currency—a privilege that allows it to issue debt at extremely low costs, to finance its trade deficit by printing paper money, and to exercise financial dominance through the Swift system and banking sanctions—is no longer the same America.
It loses the ability to project military power globally because it can no longer afford to do so.
It loses the ability to impose economic sanctions because the alternative yuan-BRICS system offers an escape route.
It loses, in essence, its empire.
This is what the late Giovanni Arrighi (former professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore intuited with extraordinary foresight.
The hegemonic transition from the dollar to a new reserve currency—or to a multipolar system without a single reserve currency—would occur not through a conscious political decision, but through the chaotic dynamics of a crisis that no single actor could fully control.
Iran is not the author of the tragedy, but the detonator that triggers an explosion whose fuse was prepared by decades of increasingly rapacious and obsolete American financial hegemony.
Thank to Pino Arlacchi
Posted by: Black Scholes | Mar 24 2026 23:59 utc | 1107
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