Since 2022, more than 100 senior People’s Liberation Army officers have been removed, disappeared, or placed under investigation, and last week two former defense ministers, Wei Fenghe and Li Shangfu, were handed suspended death sentences that will commute to life imprisonment without parole. The Central Military Commission, which is supposed to have seven members, is down to two: Xi himself and a discipline specialist. Xi’s hand-picked vice chairman, the PLA’s top professional soldier, is now under investigation.

It’s tempting to read this as pure power consolidation, a Stalin-style coup-proofing where the dictator clears out anyone who could plausibly threaten him. There’s some of that. But it doesn’t fit on its own. The PLA was, by all accounts, a deeply broken institution: officer commissions bought and sold, Rocket Force silos with blast doors that wouldn’t open, missiles found filled with water instead of fuel. Xi seems to genuinely care that the party’s military can fight.

So why now, and why this hard? Two readings, probably both true. Yes, he’s removing potential rivals and reasserting Communist Party control over a force that had drifted into a kind of fiefdom. But he’s also clearing deadwood ahead of what he plainly considers the main event of the next decade: Taiwan. The PLA hasn’t fought a real war since 1979 against Vietnam, and got humiliated then. If you’re planning to do amphibious combined-arms operations across the strait, a patronage racket won’t get you there.

We compare this to Stalin’s late-1930s purges, which gutted Soviet readiness right before Barbarossa, talk through what it means that the man Xi appointed to actually run the army is the one being disappeared, and ask the uncomfortable question: does a leaner, less corrupt, more politically loyal PLA make a Taiwan move more likely or less?

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On April 7, Scott Bessent and Jerome Powell pulled the CEOs of the biggest U.S. banks into Treasury for an urgent, closed-door briefing — not about rates, not about liquidity, but about an AI model. Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview is apparently an order of magnitude better than anything currently public at finding software vulnerabilities. Rather than release it, Anthropic built a consortium called Project Glasswing and gave the major platform companies early access to patch before the capability proliferates. The warning shot landed loud: Mozilla used Mythos to find and fix 271 previously unknown vulnerabilities in Firefox 150. On the prior version, Anthropic’s best publicly available model had surfaced 22.

That’s a one-version jump from a couple dozen to several hundred. When a process improves by an order of magnitude overnight, you pay attention. The reason policymakers are rattled isn’t that Mythos will suddenly own your bank account tomorrow — Anthropic is keeping the model caged, and non-state actors can’t train their own. The fear is the gap period: a stretch of months where a Mythos-class capability exists, hasn’t been fully used for defense yet, and could be replicated by a nation-state adversary with the means and the motive. China can probably build one. Iran and Russia probably can’t — yet. Whichever side gets through the world’s legacy open-source libraries first owns the window.

The underappreciated story is that this round of the offense-defense arms race may actually tip toward the defense. Mythos didn’t find bugs an elite human researcher couldn’t have caught; it just did it at machine speed and machine scale. Applied to new code, that points at a future where shipped software arrives without the kind of rotten foundations that made Equifax, NotPetya, and every critical-infrastructure nightmare possible. The catch is that the patching has to get done before the capability gets out. Glasswing is supposed to run through the summer. That’s the runway.

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The ceasefire’s held for over a week. The rockets, drones, and fighter-bombers are all taking a breather. The Strait of Hormuz might be opening (except to Iranian traffic, perhaps). The Gulf Arab states are expressing (very) cautious optimism. Israel might be holding its fire in Lebanon during its own separate, but linked, conflict with Hizbullah. And the Trump Administration may be on its way to back to Islamabad to try to secure a deal before the ceasefire formally lapses next week.

This is all good news… but does it really mean the war’s over? And even if it is, will it result in a lasting peace? Many issues remain unresolved, including the status of Iran’s nuclear program; its missile arsenal and regional proxy forces; and, of course, who will control the Strait of Hormuz on an ongoing basis. Plenty of claims on these points are coming out of the Trump Administration; Iran, for the time being, is mostly silent.

Increased American pressure, applied to Iranian intransigence, could result in outcomes ranging from a grand bargain to a redoubling of hostilities. The global economy, the U.S. midterm elections, and the longterm future of the fossil fuel system all hang in the balance.

This week, we’ve invited friend of the show Prof. Andrew Leber back on, and complemented him with our grad school buddy Prof. Paasha Mahdavi of UCSB—an expert on the politics of energy—to help us make sense of this increasingly confounding situation.

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On April 7th, Trump announced a two-week ceasefire with Iran, brokered by Pakistan, with negotiations now opening in Islamabad. Hegseth called it a “historic and overwhelming victory” and claimed every US objective was met. Iran called it a historic win of its own. Only one of those can be true.

Our read: Iran has the whip hand. Not because it beat the US in any conventional sense, but because it didn’t lose. It absorbed the punishment, closed the Strait of Hormuz on demand, and walked into ceasefire talks with its nuclear ambitions more justified and its coercive leverage validated. The US achieved bombing campaigns. It did not achieve regime change, did not fully protect its allies, did not denuclearize Iran, and did not destroy Tehran’s ability to hold the Strait hostage.

The Gulf monarchies, meanwhile, are stuck without great options, as guest host Prof. Andrew Leber drops in to tell us. They pushed hard in various directions — Saudi welcoming the off-ramp, UAE wanting more pressure — and are now watching an Iran that has proven asymmetric coercion works against a superpower. China, meanwhile, walked away with an 80–20 outcome: still the dominant buyer of Iranian oil, now visibly a broker of Middle East ceasefires, with Wang Yi on the phones and rare-earth leverage in reserve.

We discuss why this ceasefire is more likely to hold than you might think, why Iran now might be on its way to becoming a nuclear power, what “weaponized interdependence” looks like when it’s aimed back at Washington, and why the administration’s victory lap is a story the battlefield doesn’t support.

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The theory of the Iran War from the U.S. perspective, to the extent that one existed, hinged on getting in and out quickly: decapitate the leadership, do maximum military damage, hope that the Iranian people rise up and take over, and then go home in triumph either way. Two to three weeks, tops.

So much for that happy idea. We are five weeks in to this military “excursion,” to use President Trump’s terminology. America just blew up the biggest bridge in Iran, F-15s are getting shot out of the sky, and explosives are raining down across the entire region.

The president is tying himself in rhetorical knots, bouncing between claiming victory and threatening unlimited escalation, trying to jawbone the increasingly restive energy and stock markets all the while. Iranian hardliners are firmly in control of both their country and the all-important Strait of Hormuz. Contrary to Trump’s argument, we see little reason to think that they’ll allow tanker traffic to return to normal should the U.S. stop fighting.

The economic pain has already arrived for the Gulf’s major energy customers in Asia. Europe and North America are next. And if there’s one thing we know about American politics, it’s that high energy prices and inflation can destroy any political career — even Teflon Don’s. And if Trump ends up going down, we see a possibility that he’ll take Netanyahu and potentially even the U.S. - Israel alliance down with him.

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The US-Iran war has entered its fourth week, and both sides are now talking — sort of. Iran is demanding transit tolls through the Strait of Hormuz and feels it is owed reparations. Washington responded with a fifteen-point plan that reads less like a negotiation and more like terms of surrender. The yawning gap between those two positions is where this war lives now.

Oil is hovering around $105 a barrel. Parts of Asia are rationing fuel. The ground invasion debate is heating up in Washington, and the historical echoes — Gulf War, Eagle Claw — aren’t reassuring.

We get into what both sides actually want, why the economic pain cuts in directions nobody expected, and whether there’s a best-case scenario that doesn’t leave everyone worse off.

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Three weeks into the Iran war and there are no good options left on the table. The Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed, oil is spiking, the Gulf monarchies are being blasted, Lebanon’s on fire. A disaster of truly global proportions looms.

The strategic picture has shifted. Trump asked NATO and even China for help reopening the strait and got a flat no. A new Foreign Affairs analysis makes the case that air power alone won’t cut it — clearing the waterway would require boots on the ground along Iran’s coastline, and no one is signing up for that mission. Yet.

Inside Iran, the picture is murkier than ever. Israeli strikes have taken out key figures, including Ali Larijani, one of the few pragmatists with a track record of negotiating with the West. The smart bombs are still falling, the regime is under pressure, and the people who might have been partners for an eventual off-ramp are disappearing from the board.

Welcoming once again Prof. Andrew Leber (who has a new article out for the Carnegie Endowment) to the show, we break down the three big questions driving the conflict — who controls Iran, what happens in the Strait, and whether the US can protect its allies — and why the JCPOA crowd is feeling pretty vindicated right about now.

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The U.S.-Israeli strikes that killed Ayatollah Khamenei on February 28th were supposed to be the decisive blow. Instead, two weeks later, Iran has a new Supreme Leader, Khamenei’s son Mojtaba, installed by the Revolutionary Guards, the Strait of Hormuz is closed, and roughly 10-15% percent of global oil is off the market. The IEA just authorized the largest emergency stockpile release in history. The old boss is gone, but the regime is still standing.

This was supposed to be the Trump doctrine at work: overwhelming force, maximum leverage, quick resolution. But Iran did its homework. The regime prepared for exactly this scenario with decentralized command, asymmetric responses, and the one card that changes everything: choking off the world’s most critical energy chokepoint.

Israel is escalating on its own, hitting oil facilities around Tehran and turning the sky black. The White House isn’t thrilled. Meanwhile, the race is on. The simultaneous dumping of 400 million barrels of strategic reserves sounds like a lot until you realize global consumption will burn through that in a matter of weeks. Futures markets are betting the Strait reopens soon. If they’re wrong, we’re in for a very different kind of crisis.

We discuss whether Iran’s new leadership can hold together, why air power alone has never broken a determined regime, what Israel’s unilateral strikes mean for the coalition, and whether the economic clock runs out before the military one does.

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Please see our full post for the video version.

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On February 22nd, Mexican security forces killed Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, known as El Mencho, the leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. Within hours, CJNG retaliated with over 250 roadblocks across 20 Mexican states and set fires in Puerto Vallarta. The message was clear: the cartel’s reach extends far beyond any single leader.

But this isn’t just a story about one dead kingpin. Mexican cartels collectively control an estimated 35% of the country’s territory. They function as states within a state, providing goods and services in areas where the central government can’t or won’t. CJNG and the Sinaloa Cartel dominate, but the problem is structural, not personal.

The U.S. has been fighting the war on drugs since 1971, and the fentanyl crisis has only raised the stakes. There’s growing talk in Washington about military action on Mexican soil, but Mexico remembers that much of the American Southwest used to be theirs. Sending in troops would jeopardize decades of intelligence and law enforcement cooperation for what looks like a problem without a military solution.

We discuss the history from El Chapo to El Mencho, why cartels look eerily similar to failed-state militias in the Middle East, and whether there’s any realistic path forward that doesn’t make things worse.

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