Global Tantrum! with Steve Palley and Prof. Galen Jackson

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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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit globaltantrum.substack.com

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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This week we’re talking about one of the big ideas that shaped the world after 1945: liberal internationalism. Free trade, international institutions, and democracy promotion were the three pillars meant to keep the peace and spread prosperity. For decades, they might have (depending on who you ask, of course). But something has clearly shifted, and we wanted to dig into what exactly that something is.

We frame the conversation around two competing views. John Ikenberry argues that the liberal order was a genuine institutional achievement: a system of rules and norms that even the hegemon agreed to be bound by. Marc Trachtenberg sees it differently: what looked like international cooperation was really just American power dressed up in multilateral clothing. That tension ran through the last 80 years or so of the international system, and it’s running through our discussion, too.

The reason this matters now is pretty obvious. The institutions that were built to sustain the liberal order — the UN, NATO, the WTO — are under more strain than at any point since the Cold War. The question isn’t really whether the order is, at an absolute minimum, in deep trouble. It’s whether it was ever what its defenders claimed it was in the first place, and whether anything coherent is replacing it.

We get into all of it! Realism versus liberalism, the Iraq War as a turning point, what the rise of China actually means for these debates, and why the post-Cold War moment of American unipolarity might have been the exception rather than the rule. Give it a listen.

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The Trump administration has begun loosening semiconductor export controls on China, allowing Nvidia to sell advanced AI chips like the H20 to Chinese buyers in exchange for a cut of the revenue. It’s a sharp reversal from the Biden-era strategy of choking off China’s access to cutting-edge technology entirely, and it raises a question that has no clean answer: is it better to sell your adversary the weapons of the future, or to force them to build their own?

The semiconductor supply chain is the most strategically consequential chokepoint in the global economy. Virtually all of the world’s most advanced chips are fabricated by a single company, TSMC, on an island that China claims as its own. The United States doesn’t make the chips, but it controls the tools and software needed to design and manufacture them. That leverage is real, but it’s not unlimited, and how aggressively to use it is the central debate.

The hawkish case for tight export controls is straightforward: deny China the technology it needs to build next-generation AI and weapons systems. But China isn’t standing still. Chinese firms are innovating around the restrictions. And the tighter the controls, the more reason Beijing has to pour resources into building a fully independent supply chain, which is exactly what Washington says it wants to prevent.

We discuss the Cold War precedent of CoCom, why the lessons of export controls are less encouraging than you’d think, how Taiwan became the most important island in the world, and whether the real chip war is one the United States is fighting with itself.

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On this week’s episode, we ask an urgent question: what happens to European security when American nuclear deterrence becomes optional? The New START treaty is lapsing, Russia is deploying exotic new capabilities like the Poseidon drone, and Trump is pitching a Golden Dome missile defense system that may or may not work. The old Cold War certainties are cracking.

The episode hinges on a credibility problem that nobody really wants to talk about. France and Britain have nuclear weapons. But would they actually use them to defend Poland? But if geography matters—if standing next to your enemy with your own bomb is more convincing than relying on Washington’s promise to incinerate Moscow—then maybe European deterrence isn’t as crazy as it sounds. That’s the tension we’re exploring: does proximity create credibility, or is it just a dangerous illusion? And even more, do the British and French consider themselves “European” enough to launch on behalf of their neighbors, with whom they share major historical enmities?

The history matters here. NATO tried something called the Multilateral Force back in the 1960s, a half-baked scheme to give Europeans a say in nuclear weapons without actually giving them the bomb. It failed. Now we’re asking whether Germany could “borrow” nuclear weapons without blowing up the NPT, whether Britain’s arsenal is big enough to scare Russia, and whether France would really risk Paris for Tallinn.

We discuss the military realities, the NATO nuclear sharing arrangements that quietly persist today, and why the credibility of European deterrence might actually hinge on whether Trump really believes in the American nuclear umbrella anymore.

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In this episode, we dive into President Trump’s renewed push to acquire Greenland from Denmark. What started as a seemingly absurd proposal in 2019 has now become a serious geopolitical flashpoint, with Trump threatening tariffs on European allies and making aggressive statements at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Greenland, an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark with its capital in Nuuk, has been a source of fascination for American presidents for decades. Trump first floated the idea back in 2019, calling it “essentially a large real estate deal.” Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen responded by calling the proposal “absurd,” prompting Trump to cancel his planned state visit to Denmark.

Fast forward to January 2026, and Trump is back at it. At Davos, he walked a fine line—threatening that the U.S. would be “unstoppable” if it used force, while ultimately stating he wouldn’t use military action. He did, however, threaten tariffs on Denmark and other European nations if they didn’t cooperate. After meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, Trump announced a vague “framework” for a future deal, though details remain scarce.

The whole saga raises fundamental questions about international norms, the rights of the Greenlandic people, and America’s role in the world. As European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen noted at Davos, “We now live in a world defined by raw power.” Whether that’s the new normal or a passing phase remains to be seen.

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On January 3rd, U.S. forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife in a meticulously planned operation. The lights went out across Venezuela—a demonstration of American cyber capabilities—while Russian air defenses proved useless. The old boss is gone.

But this wasn’t regime change. Delcy Rodriguez, Maduro’s deputy, now runs the government—under Washington’s direction. Trump has made it explicit: cooperate or face worse. Another term for it could be “tyrant change.”

Why did we do this? It’s not about democracy or drugs. It’s about oil, leverage over China, cutting off Cuba’s energy lifeline, and neutralizing Maduro’s territorial threats toward oil-rich Guyana.

So far it’s working. But two weeks of success proves nothing about the long term. We discuss the strategic logic, the historical parallels to Panama and Iraq, and why the last chapter of this story is far from written.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit globaltantrum.substack.com