What Washington Now Wants From Its Allies
On 30 May 2026, speaking at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told an audience of mostly Asian defense officials...
Behave or Be Destroyed: Oman and the Vassal Clause in the American Guarantee
On 27 May, asked at a Cabinet meeting whether he would accept a short-term arrangement under which Iran and Oman would share control of...
How Unpredictability Is Rewriting the Atlantic Alliance
There is a point at which unpredictability ceases to function as a negotiating instrument and begins to function as noise. Donald Trump has not...
Mokhber’s Atomic Bomb: The Misnaming of Riparian Coercion at Hormuz
On 8 May 2026, Mohammad Mokhber, adviser to the Supreme Leader and the man who built Iran’s sanctions-resistance architecture during fourteen years at the...
Infrastructure Attribution and the Invoiced Passage at Hormuz
The Persian Gulf Strait Authority, launched by Iran on 5 May 2026, is the institutional capstone of a longer manoeuvre. Its visible apparatus reduces...
Why OPEC’s Foundational Conditions No Longer Hold for the UAE
The institutions that govern producer cartels rest on a set of conditions that are usually invisible because they hold uniformly across the membership. When...
The Ambiguity Trap: When Strategic Signals Become Systemic Perturbations
On March 31, five weeks into an active war, Pete Hegseth stood before reporters at the Pentagon and articulated what he presented as a...
The Strait as Fault Line: How Iran is Using Hormuz to Farm Sino-American Friction
There is a reading of what Iran is doing at the Strait of Hormuz that has become almost reflexive in commentary: Tehran is challenging...
Why The Middle East Crisis Cannot Be Read Through Power Alone
There is another way to read the ongoing Middle East crisis, one that makes legible what standard analysis consistently struggles to explain. It begins...
The Natural Effect of War: Trump, Hormuz and the Logic of Doux Commerce
Trump's suggestion that the United States and Iran might co-administer toll revenues in the Strait of Hormuz has been walked back by the White...