We all obviously recognize the world is rapidly changing, but our perfectly understandable distaste for volatility and violence can muddle and prevent us from comprehending the world that “is” rather than what we think it “ought” to be. Start from the “reserve currency” subject in #4 and work backwards: 4. Iran is part of a much bigger operational dismantling & reorganization of the old offshore dollar system. Because supply chains in the real economy make up the base layer collateral of the financial economy, the breakup and reforming of marketing relationships in energy commodities like oil from the Persian Gulf or natural gas from Siberia is the other side of the coin to this financial transition. 3. Bessent is fully aware that we can’t go through this transition process without some kinetics. The open-ended variable is the amount of violence this process consumes. It is obvious when comparing different leaders’ actions on the global stage that some want to see it minimized, while others want to ratchet up into a much bigger and destructive conflagration. 2. Think about the financing of the war & conflict from the frame of opposing sides of the negotiation table for the biggest of all businesses that we talked about in #1: the dual global financial and trade franchises. From where we stand today, it is crystal clear that one faction wants out of the legacy system that puts the American sovereign in a $40T debt hole, while the other makes its living off the rents of the old status quo. 1. The pressure on Iranian airlines this week is just the latest development in this financial and supply chains context: the first-order financial and export chains for Iranian oil in the old system have already been broken down. Domestic prices for refined products in Iran have collapsed to $0.11 to $0.14 a gallon. International flights offer a path for the “status quo” business operators to arb some of their lost economic profits back, in meaningful size: transform your product (oil) into a higher order service (airline transport), pulling in external revenue while undercutting higher input prices in the rest of world. The problem with this is a whole lot of players are fed up with the bullshit of the old offshore dollar system, and like the U.S. have decided they too want to move on from the old to the next thing. Contrary to OP, there’s a large contingency on that side of the table who understand the bigger picture of what’s going on and, while acknowledging that we’re in the fog of war, would assess that Bessent is, in fact, not a total retard.