Today I delve into my thoughts on the current state of the war, how bad the Islamic Regime in Iran has lost, opinions on why the USA actually wants the strait of hormuz to remain closed, the bigger geopolitical game the USA is playing and finally why the USA empire doubters and bears are dead wrong.

In the last three weeks, the United States has quietly done something that will be studied in history books for a century. Most people are too busy watching the bombs and wrongfully bearish on the American Empire.

Something has shifted that most of the world's commentary has not yet caught up to. The coverage still frames this as a war, an ongoing conflict with uncertain outcomes and escalation risk on both sides. But that framing is increasingly detached from what the data actually shows. The Islamic Republic of Iran is not losing this war, it has already lost it. What we are watching now is a managed dismantling.

Before Operation Epic Fury began on February 28th, Iran entered the conflict with an estimated 2,500 ballistic missiles, a stockpile painstakingly rebuilt since the June 2025 Twelve Day War with Israel. It sounds formidable on paper. Within ten days, approximately 2,410 of those missiles had been fired or their launchers destroyed. The launch rate peaked at 480 ballistic missiles on day one and collapsed by roughly 92 percent by day nine. CENTCOM Commander Admiral Brad Cooper described what remained as a lingering launch capability. A diplomatic way of saying there is almost nothing left.[1][2]

The hardware numbers tell the same story. The IDF reports destroying or disabling around 70 percent of Iran's estimated 500 ballistic missile launchers. Over 1,700 assets of Iran's military industrial base have been hit across the entire production chain, from the large IRGC weapons manufacturers down to the small component suppliers that keep missiles functional. Drone launches tracked the same curve as the missiles, falling 92 percent from their day one peak. The strikes have not just depleted the stockpile. They have gone after the factories, the engineers, and every replacement command centre that would be needed to rebuild.[3][4]

The naval picture is starker still. US forces sank Iranian warships across the Arabian Gulf at a pace that surprised even seasoned defence analysts. By early March, CENTCOM stated there was not a single Iranian ship underway in the Arabian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz, or the Gulf of Oman. Over 100 naval vessels have been sunk or destroyed, including 30 mine laying ships. Trump stated it plainly: the Air Force is gone. The Navy is gone. Anti aircraft is decimated. Their radar is gone, and their leaders are gone.[5][6][7]

Khamenei was killed on the very first day of strikes. The chain of command shattered. His son Mojtaba reportedly survived the opening attack by seconds, according to leaked audio that Iranian officials themselves subsequently referenced, and was hastily installed as the new Supreme Leader. He has no established authority, no popular base, and no functioning military to command.[5]

The clearest signal of all is US and Israeli strikes have recently begun targeting smaller targets: Basiji checkpoints, local IRGC installations, street level enforcement infrastructure. When a military campaign reaches that level of detail, it means the large scale threat has already been dealt with. You do not hunt rabbits when lions are still in the field.

And none of this happened to a country in rude political health. In January 2026, Iranian security forces killed tens of thousands of their own protesters in the largest uprising since the Islamic Revolution itself. A "government" that does that is running entirely on fear. The regime was primed to collapse before the first bombs fell. The bombs simply confirmed the timeline.

Here is where things get genuinely interesting, and where conventional analysis starts to feel thin.

The Strait of Hormuz has been functionally closed since the early days of the conflict. Iran announced the closure, the IRGC threatened to set ablaze any vessel attempting to pass, and tanker traffic dropped by roughly 80 percent within 24 hours, with over 150 ships anchored outside the strait waiting for clarity. Oil prices surged past 100 dollars per barrel for the first time in four years, peaking around 126. The disruption has been described as the largest blow to global energy supply since the 1970s oil crisis.

Iran's navy is gone. Its air defence is gone. US and Israeli aircraft operate freely over Iranian territory. The military capacity to force the strait open is obviously present. So why the delay?

The story behind the story is worth considering carefully. And it begins not in Tehran or Washington, but in the insurance offices of the City of London.

The strait is not just a crisis. It is an argument made in the language of oil prices.

On March 2nd, the world's major Protection and Indemnity clubs, including Gard, Skuld, NorthStandard, the London P&I Club, and the American Club, began cancelling war risk coverage for vessels in the Middle East with 72 hours notice. P&I clubs are the mutual insurers that collectively cover around 90 percent of all cargo ships on Earth. Without their cover, a ship cannot be legally chartered, cargo cannot be financed, and a voyage cannot proceed, even if the water ahead is physically open and calm. They were not acting independently. They were responding to the global reinsurers above them in the chain, the companies that insure the insurers, pulling their support for Gulf shipping coverage entirely. When that layer withdraws, everything below follows automatically.[8][9][10]

The Lloyd's Joint War Committee, the body of Lloyd's of London underwriters that designates high risk shipping zones, simultaneously expanded its danger list to include Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Djibouti. War risk premiums for hull insurance surged from around 0.2 percent of a vessel's value to as much as 5 percent overnight, a 25x increase. The strait became commercially impassable.[9][11]

Now for the part worth putting the tin foil hat on for. The Trump administration, which normally moves very fast to attack anything that raises energy prices for American consumers, has been notably quiet about the insurance situation. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said publicly that the US was happy with the pace at which ships were resuming transit, a strikingly relaxed statement for a government supposedly desperate to reopen one of the world's most critical waterways. The US then stepped in not to fix the insurance problem through pressure, but to replace the reinsurance market itself, announcing a 20 billion dollar government backed facility through the Development Finance Corporation in partnership with insurer Chubb. Washington has installed itself as the de facto insurer of all commerce through the Strait of Hormuz. You want to sail through? You need American backing to do it.[11][12]

None of this requires a conspiracy theory. It requires only the straightforward observation that the closure of Hormuz serves several American strategic interests simultaneously, and that the people managing US foreign policy are not naive about that coincidence. According to the US Energy Information Administration, 84 percent of all crude oil and 83 percent of all LNG flowing through the strait in 2024 went to Asian markets. China alone accounts for 37.7 percent of all Hormuz oil flows. The United States receives just 2.5 percent. But Europe is not insulated either. Qatar, whose LNG exports transit exclusively through Hormuz with no pipeline alternative, supplies a significant share of Europe's natural gas. European gas prices nearly doubled in the opening week of the closure, jumping from around 30 euros per megawatt hour to peaks above 60. America, the world's largest domestic oil producer and a net exporter since 2021, barely flinched. The countries most exposed to the closure are, without exception, the same countries that have been most resistant to American geopolitical leadership. That convergence does not need to be coordinated to be real.[13][14][24]

Stepping back, the picture that emerges is one where a closed Strait of Hormuz is, for America, far less a crisis than it is a pressure campaign running on two fronts simultaneously.

Zoom out far enough and the Iran conflict starts to look like one move in a sequence that began months earlier.

In early January 2026, US special forces seized Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in Caracas. The stated rationales were familiar: democracy, rule of law, narcotrafficking. But the energy dimension was unmistakable. Venezuela sits atop the world's largest proven oil reserves, an estimated 303 billion barrels, more than Saudi Arabia and Iran. Under Maduro those reserves were being sold at steep discounts, often outside the dollar system, frequently to China and Russia. US companies were locked out. That changed immediately. Treasury licenses began flowing to American energy majors. The cash flows from Venezuelan oil sales were rerouted not to the state oil company PDVSA but into a US controlled account. Washington did not just remove an unfriendly government. It took operational control of the planet's largest reserve base.[15]

Then came Iran. And with it, the closure of the strait.

The two countries that had most aggressively sought to operate outside the petrodollar system, trading oil in rubles, yuan, and cryptocurrency specifically to bypass American financial infrastructure, were Venezuela and Iran. Within the span of a few months, both have been folded back into the American orbit. Venezuela by force, Iran by conflict. The petrodollar, which many analysts had been writing obituaries for, has been meaningfully reinforced. The two main exits from the dollar denominated oil system have been bricked up.[16]

There is a line in America's July 2025 AI Action Plan that deserves more attention than it has received. The White House document frames US global strategy around artificial intelligence supremacy, and is blunt about the prerequisite: we need to build and maintain vast AI infrastructure and the energy to power it. The National Energy Dominance Council, established by executive order in early 2025, was created to link energy production directly to national security. The Department of Energy's Genesis Mission, launched in November 2025 and described in its own executive order as comparable in urgency to the Manhattan Project, ties AI driven scientific discovery to energy dominance. What looks like a series of aggressive foreign policy moves starts to look, in this framing, like a coherent infrastructure project. AI dominance requires energy. Energy must be cheap at home and expensive for competitors. The control of global energy chokepoints is the mechanism through which that asymmetry gets enforced.[19][20][21]

For Europe, the pain of a disrupted Strait of Hormuz creates pressure to do something that decades of American diplomacy could never fully achieve: get serious about contributing to the military and energy security architecture that America has been subsidising. France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and the UK are already in discussions about naval escort missions, being pulled into regional security arrangements they had previously been content to outsource entirely to Washington. And every European warship in the Gulf is strategic capacity America can redirect eastward, toward the Indo Pacific, toward the long competition with China that will define the coming generation.

For China, the calculus is starker. Roughly 45 to 50 percent of China's crude oil imports transit the Strait of Hormuz, along with nearly a third of its LNG imports. Beijing's extraordinary economic growth has been built on access to cheap Middle Eastern energy, and that access now runs at American sufferance. China has strategic reserves covering roughly 120 days of imports at 2025 consumption levels. That sounds substantial until you remember it is a countdown clock, and as it runs down, Beijing's negotiating position on Taiwan, on trade, on technology, on everything, runs down with it. Trump has already begun exploiting this directly, suggesting he might delay his planned visit to Beijing unless China joins a coalition to reopen the strait. A decade ago the idea of America using energy access as explicit leverage over China on a geopolitical dispute would have seemed fanciful.[17][18]

Which brings me to my final thought. There is a particular genre of commentary that has emerged around these events, and it deserves a direct response. It goes roughly like this: America has overreached, the budget cannot sustain this, the US dollar will lose its dominance, the US empire is entering its terminal phase. Prominent voices across technology, finance, and media have adopted some version of this framing. Some have done so thoughtfully. Many have not.

The critique is not without substance. Wars are expensive. Air defence munitions are being consumed at rates that create genuine resupply concerns. Oil prices above 100 dollars damage consumer confidence. There are real costs here, and they are not trivial.

But the bearish framing misses something fundamental. While commentators were writing op-eds about American overreach, China was running a quiet, patient, decade-long project to make America's financial leverage irrelevant. It was buying roughly 90 percent of Iran's oil exports, disguising the transactions through third countries to evade sanctions. It was financing Venezuelan infrastructure in exchange for oil supply deals priced in Chinese yuan. The goal was straightforward: build an alternative global energy economy, one that does not run on dollars, does not depend on American-controlled financial systems, and cannot be switched off by Washington when Beijing does something America dislikes. Venezuela and Iran were the two load-bearing pillars of that architecture.[22][23]

Picture it simply. The dollar's global dominance rests largely on the fact that every country on Earth needs oil, and oil is priced in dollars, so every country on Earth perpetually needs dollars. Break that chain, and you break the mechanism that allows America to fund its military, project its power, and impose sanctions on anyone who steps out of line. China understood this. It was working the problem. And it was closer to solving it than most Western analysts were willing to admit.

America did not stumble into this. It chose its moment deliberately, and the timing matters more than most people appreciate. Every year that passed was a year Iran's proxies grew more entrenched, its nuclear programme crept closer to the threshold, and the parallel energy architecture linking Tehran to Beijing became harder to unwind without taking half the global economy down with it. The bears asking whether America can afford this war are asking the wrong question. The right question is whether America could have afforded to wait another decade, watching that noose tighten, until acting from a position of strength was no longer an option at all.

Here is what the doomsayers always miss. When a great power starts visibly declining, it does not simply continue declining unopposed. It produces a reaction. The people who understand what is at stake, who have spent careers in finance, strategy, and foreign policy watching the drift get worse, eventually decide they have seen enough and step in. The same crisis the cynics were diagnosing is precisely what put serious, capable people in the room where these decisions get made. Decline is not always a one-way street. Sometimes it is the alarm clock.

Geopolitics is more complex than any single analytical framework. The variables are not constant. Game theory, industrial reality, domestic politics, and military doctrine all interact within the broader chess board, and occasionally produce outcomes that pure structural analysis cannot predict. A framework that was correct in its pessimism at one moment can be completely wrong in the next, not because it misread the data, but because the data itself changed in response to the diagnosis.

But to look at this board, right now, and call it American decline requires a wilful blindness to what just happened. In the span of a few months, America secured the two largest oil reserve bases on Earth, installed itself as the permanent gatekeeper of the waterway that powers its rivals' economies, dismantled the alternative financial architecture China spent a decade building, and positioned itself as the undisputed master of the energy flows that will determine who wins the AI race. These are not separate wins. They are the same win, executed across multiple theatres at once, by people who understood exactly what they were doing.

The regime in Tehran is already gone. The world is being rearranged around that fact. China is draining its reserves. Europe is being handed a bill it cannot refuse. The dollar is more entrenched than it was a year ago. And the country that controls the energy, the chokepoints, and the AI infrastructure is the same country it has always been. Anyone telling you this is the beginning of American decline is not reading the same world the rest of us are living in.

The American century did not end here. It was renewed.

Clouted.

1.  US Central Command (2026) Statement by CENTCOM Commander Admiral Brad Cooper on Iranian Ballistic Missile Attacks, 5 March. Available at: centcom.mil.

2.  Jerusalem Post (2026) Iran's missile fire rate has collapsed by 92%: What's next? 9 March. Available at: jpost.com.

3.  Foundation for Defense of Democracies (2026) Why Iran's Ballistic Missile Launches Are Declining, McMillan, C., Brobst, R. and Bowman, B., 4 March. Available at: longwarjournal.org.

4.  Times of Israel (2026) IDF planning 3 more weeks of operations to systematically degrade Iran's defense industry, 15 March. Available at: timesofisrael.com.

5.  Wikipedia (2026) 2026 Iran war. Available at: en.wikipedia.org. Accessed 20 March 2026. Primary sources include Fars News Agency, 1 March; CENTCOM statements throughout.

6.  Axios (2026) The U.S. is destroying Iran's navy after it tried to shut down global oil flows, 1 March. Available at: axios.com.

7.  CBS News (2026) Iran war keeps gas prices high, with Strait of Hormuz paralyzed despite Trump's demands, 17 March. Available at: cbsnews.com.

8.  Windward AI (2026) Strait of Hormuz Shipping Falls After Insurance Pullback, 18 March. Available at: windward.ai.

9.  Lloyd's List (2026) Shipowners weigh up risk of dark Hormuz transits, 3 March. Available at: lloydslist.com.

10.  Al Jazeera (2026) Maritime insurers cancel war risk cover in Gulf: Will it hike energy costs? 3 March. Available at: aljazeera.com.

11.  Insurance Journal (2026) Lloyd's CEO Says It's Critical Mideast War Cover Stays Available, 19 March. Available at: insurancejournal.com.

12.  Insurance Business Magazine (2026) US government offers shipping reinsurance for Hormuz transit, March. Available at: insurancebusinessmag.com.

13.  US Energy Information Administration (2025) Amid regional conflict, the Strait of Hormuz remains critical oil chokepoint. Available at: eia.gov.

14.  Visual Capitalist (2026) Charted: Oil Trade Through the Strait of Hormuz by Country, citing EIA Q1 2025 data. Available at: visualcapitalist.com.

15.  Fortune (2026) Trump said the U.S. would run Venezuela and sell its oil. Now it's starting to happen, 18 March. Available at: fortune.com.

16.  Reuters via Gulf Times (2026) Trump's Venezuela oil adventure revives petrodollar debate, 10 January. Available at: gulf-times.com.

17.  Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy (2026) Implications of the Conflict in the Middle East for China's Energy Security, Corbeau, A-S. et al., 19 March. Available at: energypolicy.columbia.edu.

18.  Oxford Institute for Energy Studies (2026) Disruption in the Strait of Hormuz, OIES Energy Comment, March. Available at: oxfordenergy.org.

19.  White House (2025) Winning the Race: America's AI Action Plan, July. Available at: whitehouse.gov.

20.  White House (2025) Establishing the National Energy Dominance Council, Executive Order 14213, February. Available at: whitehouse.gov.

21.  Department of Energy (2025) Genesis Mission Executive Order, November. Available at: energy.gov.

22.  War on the Rocks (2026) How Does the Iran War Affect China's Energy Security? March. Available at: warontherocks.com.

23.  Al Jazeera (2026) Venezuela after Maduro: Oil, power and the limits of intervention, 6 January. Available at: aljazeera.com.

24.  Wikipedia (2026) 2026 Strait of Hormuz crisis. Available at: en.wikipedia.org. Accessed 20 March 2026.