Trump bombs Iran, what could possibly go wrong?

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"The Strait of Hormuz is “closed.” Effectively closed, anyway, perhaps not legally, but especially if you’re the captain of a 300,000-ton tanker insured by Lloyd’s and you’d prefer not to be vaporized by a drone, you might consider that distinction academic.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have declared the strait closed and threatened to fire on vessels attempting passage. Tankers are clustering like nervous wildebeest at a crocodile crossing. Insurance clubs, the deeply unsexy but absolutely essential plumbing of global trade, have begun canceling war-risk coverage. More than any missile, that is what makes markets sweat.
Because missiles are dramatic. Insurance cancellations are lethal.
Without insurance, ships don’t sail. Cargo doesn’t finance, ports don’t accept deliveries, and banks don’t clear payments. The global economy, it turns out, runs less on oil than on paperwork.
Oil markets responded exactly the way oil markets always respond when someone even whispers the words “Hormuz disruption.” Brent jumped into the high $70s per barrel. WTI climbed into the low $70s. A sharp move, yes, but not yet apocalyptic? There’s still a staggering amount of crude sloshing around the oceans, parked off Singapore, idling near Malaysia, sitting in tankers waiting for instructions like a floating petroleum reserve with better sea views.
Over the past 24 hours, we’ve watched the conflict widen from “U.S. and Israeli targets” to “let’s start touching the plumbing.” Reports of strikes near Ras Laffan in Qatar, home to major LNG facilities. Drone incidents around Ras Tanura in Saudi Arabia. Debris falling near Jebel Ali in Dubai. A tanker struck in the Gulf of Oman. The Stena Imperative hit while berthed in Bahrain in dry dock, gas-free, tragically killing a shipyard worker but avoiding the nightmare scenario of a fully fueled inferno.
Here’s the thing Gulf leaders understand better than anyone: you can posture about ideology all you want, but once you start rattling LNG terminals and export hubs, you are no longer playing regional chess. You’re nudging global inflation, Asian utilities, European gas storage, and American pump prices.
Which is why the insurance story might be the real canary here. Seven of the twelve major protection and indemnity clubs signaling war-risk exclusions is extraordinary. Though not permanent, they’ll almost certainly reissue coverage at much higher premiums. That repricing moment is the cause of the pause. Shipping doesn’t stop because it physically can’t move; it stops because no one wants to foot the bill if it explodes.
This is not yet the Tanker War of the 1980s redux. There is no confirmed mining of the strait. No sustained campaign of sinking vessels mid-transit. No convoys threading through missile corridors under full naval escort. Traffic has dropped, not vanished. The Joint Maritime Information Center has called the risk level “critical,” but it has also explicitly noted there is no formal legal closure.
What would truly change the game? Mines. Sustained interdiction. A U.S. naval vessel hit. Multiple tankers sunk underway. Insurance markets refusing to return at any price.
On the political side, the Gulf states are walking a tightrope strung between fury and survival. Qatar and Saudi Arabia have spent years carefully rebuilding diplomatic channels with Tehran. That was not done out of love; it was done out of cold security logic. Now energy infrastructure is being tested, and the question becomes: at what point does “not our war” turn into “you’re hitting our house”?
GCC leaders are publicly emphasizing restraint. Diplomacy remains “open.” Leverage will come through investment relationships, security partnerships, and, bluntly, the reminder to Washington that blowing up the neighborhood is bad for business. The language is measured because the alternative is catastrophic.
In Washington, the tone is… less measured. Trump declared the operation “ahead of schedule,” dismissed the notion of boredom (a reassuring metric for strategic stability), and expanded the menu of objectives in ways that suggested a plan that evolves in real time. Boots on the ground have gone from unthinkable to conceivable to likely.
Markets are reacting rationally so far. Oil is up, but not parabolic. Natural gas in the U.S. Henry Hub has moved modestly, because American gas pricing is still driven more by weather and storage than Gulf geopolitics. LNG is the wild card. If Qatari exports face sustained disruption, that ripples outward fast.
For now, this is a shock, not a collapse. Shipping companies are hunkering down. Insurers are recalculating. Tanker charter rates are tripling. Traders are gaming duration scenarios. Consumers are filling gas cans because humans are predictable.
The most important variable is duration. If ships begin moving again under repriced insurance by week’s end, this becomes an expensive scare. If infrastructure hits continue, if LNG remains offline, if the strait becomes a shooting gallery rather than a chokepoint with nerves, then we move into a different category, one where inflation accelerates, alliances harden, and the phrase “energy security” regains the ominous tone it had in the 1970s."
follow me on Substack at marygeddry.com and @magixarc.bsky.social
#USPolitics #iran #ForeignPolicy #kakistocracy #Authoritarianism
https://youtu.be/q3QcWJiNohE?si=HbvaHmKge9HtYU7

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US troops were told this was for Armageddon

https://jonathanlarsen.substack.com/p/u ... irect=true

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Meanwhile the UK is sending military planes to evac its citizens in the ME who want a ride home.

[mister_coffee]

Top left is for sure from a video game. Right seems to be AI generated.

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https://crooksandliars.com/2026/03/thom ... -terrorism

oh, and btw, there are a huge number of misattributed videos filling the internet, Fox is unsurprisingly posting clips of explosions that are not even in Iran or happened before last weekend's strikes and attributing them to the current war. Beware.

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Good explainer discussion
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CFVlQ8ftVo

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Well, the lag created by ending the tax credits for EV's and Trump's policies has set up China to go gang busters with their EV's.

[mister_coffee]

Ironically other automakers are finally catching up and producing EVs competitive with Tesla.

One of the things that is also happening is that auto companies realized that it made more economic sense to sell their own EVs at a discount rather than not sell an EV and pay billions of dollars in carbon offsets to Tesla.

[mister_coffee]

Oil prices have soared after U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran continued on Sunday night.

Brent crude
prices hit a new 52-week high on Monday, rising 7.6% to reach $78.41 at 6:00 a.m. ET, while U.S. West Texas Intermediate
prices also rose more than 7.4% to $72.01.

Y'know, for a president who got voted in on the promise of lowering prices, and whose popularity is also waning, starting a war in the Middle East doesn't seem to be a smart move. Starting such a war with no other support, either from Congress or internationally, seems to me suicidal.

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Q: who outside of OPEC benefits from the price of oil going up?
A: a guy who stole oil from South America
B: a guy who sells electric cars
C: a guy in Moscow who sells a lot of oil to China
D: all of the above
D. Final answer.

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"I went to war three times and I'm sick of this"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQyPPRXDmLU

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MTG says it like it is.
https://crooksandliars.com/2026/02/marj ... ttack-iran

[mister_coffee]

Oh, and I just bought an EV (but not a blue Tesla) last week and it might have been a smarter decision that I would have otherwise thought.

[mister_coffee]

Yes, they are "using AI" but probably not as an overall battle management and information system like the Ukrainians have done. And the Ukrainians are very much in the baby steps phase with that. And such a system has very little to do with what Anthropic does.

I also suspect that nearly all optically (tv) guided weapons in the arsenal now use at least some computer vision AI for final guidance. That is cheap and simple to add, often just a software change. As an example, a pre-AI Tomahawk cruise missile could easily be targeted at a specific building or a part of a larger building. With AI targeting you could tell it which window to fly into.

[PAL]

I wondered if they were using AI.
Pictures on national news showed Dubai airport damage.
Let's not forget the school for girls that killed dozens. Israel or US bombs.

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WSJ - Hours after cutting Anthropic out the Pentagon uses it for the strike on Iran

https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/iran-s ... IbsQ%3D%3D

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Reports are coming in that Iran has launched an attack on the Dubai International Airport and instructed oil tankers that the Strait of Hormuz is closed. This is a rapid pace of regional destabilization.

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WH insider betting

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Iran has struck back with strikes throughout the ME. Dems are trying to force a war powers vote this coming week but without a super majority Trump will be able to veto it. Pictures in the link
https://aaronparnas.substack.com/p/majo ... dium=email

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this is not going to go well

https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/trump-la ... irect=true

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there's a certain irony that the first round of attacks included a strike on a girls' school, reportedly killing 63 girls
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/2 ... -50-people