Spicy take incoming. 🔥🔥 The combined bomber offensive in WW2 finally crippled the Axis powers by destroying their fuel supply chain. Then it took the industrial might of the entire US to build tens of thousands of bombers. Now anyone between you and the Middle East can burn down a refinery, tank farm, pipeline, or tanker, with an easily assembled robotic flying bomb that costs less than my AI subscriptions. @PeterZeihan predicted "the tanker war" would happen in the Indian Ocean but it doesn't matter where. There's only one country that could plausibly enforce global peace on shipping lanes and only one industrial power that is self sufficient on oil supply, and it's the same country. Trump asks Iran and Zelensky to please stop blowing shit up for five minutes, but the primary victims of this phase of the kinetic conflict are China and Europe, both places that have spent decade(s) ignoring and/or undermining the Pax Americana and, in Europe's case, going out of their way to destroy their own economies. China wants to be a big boy on the global stage? Let them spend their own blood and treasure pacifying the Middle East. Europe wants to stick it to Trump? It's easier to tell the yanks to get fucked if you don't rely on them for literally every aspect of your industrial infrastructure and economic stability. I've been in rooms with senior energy ministers from Europe and China. The Chinese are rational and pragmatic, the Europeans are functionally comatose, but neither party has a better plan than getting into a bidding war to buy whatever LNG the US can spare, forever. It is blindingly obvious to me that the least unstable future equilibrium is one where oil users localize supply using solar synthetic fuel tech, essentially a silico-industrial form of farm-to-table agriculture. Short supply chains, locally secured. It is equally obvious to me that a generation of people who grew up in the "developed" world are going to endure a decade or more of severe hardship before they, collectively, accept the L and move to the next step. Most people would rather watch their neighbor freeze than admit they were wrong.