Trump says it’s nearly over, but Iran is still tightening the trap, the oil shock is spreading, and Washington already looks desperate for a way out. Right, so Tel Aviv has been hit again, central Israel has been under alerts again, commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz have been hit again, and Donald Trump is now doing the exact opposite of what strong men do when they are winning: looking for a way out. That is the story as it stands today. Not control. Not dominance. Not the clean victory lap he and Benjamin Netanyahu were puffing and panting through waving their respective flags, that they thought they were buying with bombs if they threw enough of Iran, because there is no way Iran could cope with such an assault right? Didn’t work out that way did it though? Iran is still firing, and still haven’t broken out their best stuff yet by all accounts. The region is still tightening up, the costs are still spreading through shipping, oil, prices at the petrol pumps and troop exposure, and the White House is hunting an exit, even allegedly going cap in hand to Putin to try and get to an endgame. So there is your meltdown. The side that sold this as strength has landed in the oldest trap in war, because these people are functionally idiots: they can still make things worse, but they cannot make it look under control, Iran said they wouldn’t back down if you struck them and they’re doing so. No way out. Donald Trump is not talking like a man who has achieved his aims and can now calmly set terms. He is talking like a man who helped start something far dirtier and wider than the sales pitch allowed for, and is now trying to edge toward an exit without admitting the whole thing has gone badly wrong. So the old cover story is done all the same.

Trump’s “quick war” is already widening into a regional liability - Iraq hit, Gulf cover blown, oil shock rising, and even his own side reportedly wants an exit. Right, so Donald Trump has spent the last few days talking like this war is going brilliantly. He stood in Florida and said the United States was making “major strides”, said some people could say the job was “pretty well complete”, then said he could call it a “tremendous success” right now or go further, and of course he said they were going to go further didn’t he? It must be lovely to live in a world devoid of reality. yet at almost the same time, people around him have reportedly been urging him to start talking about a way out. So there it is, right at the top, no mystery, no ceremony, no need for any clever decoding. The man in public is still selling victory, but the people near him still in touch with some semblance of real life are already looking for the exit. Making matters worse, US CENTCOM has managed a trumpian trick all of their own. Gulf governments have spent this war trying to sound like they are above it, beside it, merely enduring the weather while American forces happen to pass through. As if those US bases were just figments of Iran’s imagination and these Gulf monarchies and their Israeli normalisation and US alliances were equally all pie in the sky too. Well, CENTCOM has blown that notion sky high. You see they have put out their own material showing HIMARS supporting Operation Epic Fury, HIMARS standing for High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, which is a lot more understandable, mobile rocket launchers basically, and its blown this whole Gulf State denial act out of the water, because guess where CENTCOM said these HIMARS are?

Israel’s own propaganda racket is now being sued by the very people and firms it used to sell the Gaza lie abroad Right, so Israel’s own propaganda racket has started chasing the state for its money. People hired to go out and sell Israel’s line, shoved in front of cameras, flown around, paid through private companies, performed a skit on Insta are now saying the state never paid up. Not the usual critics. Not the people Israel always tries to smear and brush aside. Its own people. Its own companies. The same outfit used to push the story abroad is now sitting under lawsuits and payment claims from inside the machine itself. Now this is frankly quite funny, the state that sells a con by way of new has itself conned the conners, but it is also filthy, because once the people hired to do the lying start demanding their money in public, this stops looking like conviction and starts looking exactly like what it is, a paid operation with court paperwork now attached and the propagandists chasing some two million shekels. Now the Prime Minister’s Office took over this hasbara machinery after the Ministry of Information collapsed after 7 October 2023, so that already tells you something useful about the moral confidence of the whole operation, because if the thing is so righteous and so self-evident and so obviously true, why is it being thrown together in a rush through replacement channels inside government as the bombs are falling and the bodies are piling up? Moshik Aviv was the chap who had just taken over the national information system in August 2023 and then the genocide of Gaza commences following that Hamas attack on October 7th. Staffing is thin, urgency is cited, normal tender procedures are said to have been bypassed, and private production companies are pulled in as payment conduits for people representing Israel abroad. Listen to the language of that and tell me it does not sound exactly like what it is trying not to say. “Payment channels.” “Irregularities.” “External consultants.” “Exceptional payments.” The whole vocabulary is built to keep the stain off the façade. Strip the wording back to ordinary English and what you are left with is a state operation using outside firms to fund message carriers during a genocide, and now those firms are saying the money did not arrive through signed work orders.

Israel pulled an epic self-own - and instead of breaking Iran, it’s triggered toxic fallout, oil panic and a much bigger war. Right, so Israel has spent days selling this as control, as precision, as pressure, as the kind of war those in the know can widen without losing hold of the edges, and now Tehran is sitting under toxic smoke and black rain after fuel depots and refinery-linked sites were hit, a Chinese intelligence vessel has been reported operating south of Iran in international waters near the Gulf, and footage from the video game ARMA has been circulating online as if somebody needed fake explosions to make the real ones look more convincing. That is how things are going now. Not with a neat chain of military success, but with a poisoned capital, an information war that cannot keep its trousers up, and outside powers moving closer to the scene because the fire is now big enough to pull them in. Then Iran named Mojtaba Khamenei as the new Supreme Leader under wartime conditions, so the leadership gap Israel and Washington plainly wanted did not open. It shut. Overnight. Just as they were told it would. With a new man in place and the whole succession question taken off the table by a formal appointment. China has not sent in divisions, nobody is pretending that, but Liaowang-1, the vessel in question is being reported south of the Iranian coast in international waters, not randomly sight-seeing, but positioned so that it’d be a war crime for the US or Israel to try the same stunt here, that they tried with that Iranian training vessel off Sri Lanka last week, and Beijing has already had its foreign ministry fielding questions about safe passage through Hormuz because Chinese trade and energy flows sit inside this war prominently, Iran being a major source of energy for them. That is what happens when you decide to turn a regional confrontation into a shipping and energy crisis though isn’t it? Other powers do not need to fire a shot to become part of the pressure.

Trump’s Iran war is not just hitting oil routes, it is dragging Europe’s fake energy independence into the open and putting Russia back in the frame. Right, so Donald Trump has set this one up so badly that a war sold as strength against Iran is starting to look like a gift to Vladimir Putin, and no, not because Putin has suddenly become some military wizard in the Gulf, but because oil and gas do not care about swagger, tanker routes do not salute campaign slogans, and Europe still runs on fuel it does not control. The Strait of Hormuz has been carrying around 20 million barrels a day, a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil trade, and once traffic there backs up, Saudi Arabia can reroute some cargo through the Red Sea, the UAE can bypass a slice of it from the Omani side of their country, which sits just outside the Strait, but nowhere near enough to replace the gaping hole left in global oil and gas supply. So the first thing that hits is not a speech, not a summit, not one of those tragic little statements about resilience from people who would not know what resilience was if it landed on their desk and kicked their coffee cup over. The first thing that hits is price, shipping, storage, and buyers fighting for cargo. QatarEnergy has already put force majeure on affected LNG buyers after halting production at Ras Laffan, and that matters because gas is where the polite European story starts wheezing. Oil is ugly but flexible. Europe can buy more crude from places like Norway, the United States, Kazakhstan, West Africa, North Africa, wherever the grade works. Gas does not work like that. Gas needs liquefaction plants, tankers, regas terminals, contracts, and a seller with spare supply. So once Qatar drops out even partially, Europe is not browsing many shelves for a replacement source. Europe is entering an auction. Asia is already the bigger direct buyer of Gulf energy, so when Gulf LNG goes missing or gets delayed, Asian buyers will then go hunting in the same Atlantic market Europe will need to for a refill. That is how Trump’s Iran war turns into Europe’s energy trap, with tankers diverting east and Europe staring at its storage schedule with ever increasing dismay. The European Commission has spent the last few years telling everyone the system is more secure now though haven’t they? It has points on paper for that. EU gas storage rules still target 90 per cent by the start of winter.

Trump & Israel’s war lies are going up in flames — from Haifa to the Gulf, the fire, failures and panic are getting harder to hide. Donald Trump has rushed more than 20,000 bombs to Israel under emergency authority, while B-1 bombers have landed at RAF Fairford, because no matter what Keir Starmer says, the UK is definitely involved, though it ought to be pointed out that RAF Fairford has little to do with the RAF, it is just a US air base on UK soil, because of course we have such things here too. All whilst that has been going on, anti-war organiser Mike Prysner, a guy who knows a thing or two about war given he has served in both Iraq and Syria has now said US troops and families are contacting his group, the Center on Conscience and War, or CCW looking for help to avoid deployment. One soldier told his mother in his final call home that his unit would be going “boots on the ground” that night, and that his commander said the operation was meant to bring about the Second Coming of Christ, but we’re supposed to believe the Iranians are the religious zealots of course. But that is the current picture in one go: more bombs for Israel, American bombers in Britain, and the coming of the Lord in exchange for razing Iran – how very Christian, not. That is not a picture of control. That is a picture of a war machine feeding itself harder because the first sales pitch has already fallen flat. Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu sold this as pressure, deterrence and dominance, the usual words the men in suits use when they are about to set half a region alight and call it stability. And it’s not just Trump with issues blowing up in his face right now either.

Jordan says it is outside the Iran war, but with missiles overhead & a US missile launcher destroyed, that story is getting harder to sell by the hour. Right, so King Abdullah of Jordan said on 24 February that Jordan would not let its airspace be violated and would not become a battlefield. Four days later Jordanian forces were intercepting drones and ballistic missiles over the country, the Interior Ministry was dealing with falling debris across multiple regions, and people in Jordan were being told to treat suspicious objects like live danger instead of bad weather. That is the first promise gone. The state line was that Jordan would stay out of the war between the United States, Israel and Iran while protecting its own territory. The actual condition on the ground was missiles overhead, fragments coming down, airspace controls, and emergency alerts. A government can call that sovereignty if it likes. People tend to call it the war arriving anyway don’t they? If it looks like a war and smells like a war, it’s a war. By 1 March the Interior Ministry had recorded 73 incidents involving falling objects and missile debris, with property damage reported in Amman, Zarqa, Madaba, West Balqa, Jaresh, Irbid, Aqaba and the Central Badia, and that leaves the palace with wreckage on record. The Jordanian Armed Forces then said they had intercepted 49 drones and ballistic missiles. That matters because it strips the polite little fiction down to the studs. Jordan is not sitting on a hill watching two other countries trade blows through binoculars. Jordanian air defences are up, Jordanian skies are active, Jordanian territory is taking fallout, lying between Israel and Iran as it does, and the state itself is counting the pieces. There is no neutral-looking way to dress that up once the numbers are public. When a government moves from issuing regional statements to listing debris incidents governorate by governorate, the distance between “we are not part of this” and “please report suspicious fragments to the authorities” has already closed.

Trump and Israel wanted a war with Iran — what they’ve got instead is failing defences, trapped allies, and a nightmare spreading across the whole region. Right, so Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu wanted a war with Iran. What they have got instead is a widening chain of blowback that now runs through Israeli cities, British bases, Gulf oil terminals, shipping lanes, airline schedules, insurance markets and the homes of people who had no say in any of this. The sales pitch was control. The footage says otherwise. Iranian missiles and drones have kept getting through. Israeli authorities have kept tightening what can be filmed and shown. Trump has started talking about “unconditional surrender” because when the clean quick dominance fantasy falls apart, the language just gets bigger while the room for manoeuvre gets smaller. The fantasy that passes for a brain in the head of the mango coloured muppet seemingly has no bounds. Of course he’s not the only muppet in the room right now. Pete Hegseth has confirmed an investigation into the strike on Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab after a US official told investigators the strike was likely American, and the evidence around the site has made the usual excuses look very thin. More than 165 people were reported killed there during school hours, most of them as we know were children, and satellite analysis has pointed to clustered, precise impacts inside the compound rather than some random malfunction story doing the rounds to protect reputations. The school stood next to a Revolutionary Guards compound, questions need asking about that certainly, it’s the sort of thing we expect Israel to do. But equally that does not make the school a military target.

Trump and Netanyahu sold this as control - now Israel’s getting blasted, Lebanon’s blowing wide open, and the lies are falling apart. Right, so Tel Aviv has been hit again. Central Israel has been under alerts again. Explosions have been reported again. And Donald Trump has chosen that exact moment to announce that Washington must have a role in choosing Iran’s next leader. What planet is he on? He’s up against the wall right now, the Middle East is on fire and he thinks somehow, he’s winning. Israel gets hit in public, the promise of control starts looking very thin, and the man backing Benjamin Netanyahu decides this is the perfect time to talk not like a defender, not like a mediator, but like somebody auditioning for the job of Emperor. Well this one is wearing no clothes and that is a horrible mental image for which I will apologise for. Netanyahu is still widening the war, increasingly moving into Lebanon now as well as continuing atrocities across the Palestinian territory. Trump is all but declaring victory even though Iran is very much still firing and apparently is still using stock right now more than 10 years old – they’re not even into the modern stuff yet. So this is not a neat campaign under tight management. That is a story slipping increasingly out of control for Trump and Co, with Israel and all those Gulf states the US swore to protect in exchange for those bases very still on the receiving end of Iranian fire. Donald Trump has not misspoken here though. He has not been dragged off message by some stray microphone or an awkward media question causing him to soil himself. He has said out loud that the US wants a say in who runs Iran next.

$95 Billion that congress doesn't want you to know about, the return of the Houthis and a bit of a head scratcher over some drones... Right, so Donald Trump is being handed a bill being talked about at roughly ninety-five billion dollars as the expected cost for backing Israel through a war with Iran, and the US Senate has just blocked an effort to curb his war powers, which is the neat procedural way of saying: the people who could have slowed this down have decided they won’t. At the same time, Yemen is signalling it’s back on the board – perhaps you’ve been wondering where the Houthis have been thusfar in all of this, with reports saying that Sanaa is now in a declared state of war and the timing of their first actions therefore is the question left hanging in the air right now, and when that switch flips, it won’t’ necessarily just hit one city, it will hit shipping lanes and energy flows, their warning having gone out not to Israel or the US, but to other Gulf states saying if they attack Iran, the Houthis will be coming after their oil and gas. And then you’ve got a third thread, staying with the oil and gas theme, but away from the Houthis.