We are now closing out the second full week of Operation: AIPAC FURY, in which the Epstein Coalition decided to attack Iran without any kind of justification, rationale, clearly defined set of objectives, or, hell, anything even REMOTELY resembling a plan. The result has been perhaps the most spectacular political meltdown in American history. Angry Short Trump has managed to thoroughly wreck and destroy whatever was left of his Administration, in the space of just a couple of weeks, because he did exactly what he promised he would NOT do on the campaign trail.

He promised to end stupid pointless foreign wars. Instead, he got America embroiled in a war it absolutely cannot win – and which will destroy the American Empire.

How? It is very simple.

First, though, we must establish the premise that America is indeed an empire. I do not consider this to be a matter of dispute, but there are still (unfortunately) plenty of Ameribros who are deluded enough to believe they continue to live in a dumbocracy, or a “Constitutional republic”.

This is utter nonsense. America IS an empire, and even a cursory comparison of it with empires of the past will show this.

If we look at any empire in history worth the name, we see they all had extremely powerful militaries, with vassals or satraps that did their bidding (often unwillingly), and exercised inordinate influence over a specific sphere or tract of territory. They did not tolerate rivals well, often went to war against them, and ended up diverting vast quantities of resources from their core heartlands to the establishment and maintenance of foreign outposts and territories.

The US meets all of these criteria, and then some. It does not have allies – it has slave-states, especially in Europe. It maintains a colossally expensive web of military bases around the world. If any of its vassals dare to step out of line, the US simply tells them to suck it up, and threatens to wage economic war and strangle their trade relationships if they do not shut up. If such threats do not work, the very real presence of American military forces on the soil of those satraps always ends up clinching the argument. And the US spends a truly mind-boggling amount of money every single year maintaining the immense network of embassies, consulates, bases, and outposts, which give it tremendous leverage over the rest of the world.

So the US is, after all, an empire. Indeed, it is virtually unique among historical imperial powers, in that it possesses the “exorbitant privilege”, as it is sometimes called, of the world’s reserve currency. Even the British Empire, back when it was at its peak, did not have the level of control over global trade, that the US has (or had), due to the use of the US dollar as the world’s default currency. The entire post-WWII Bretton Woods architecture was specifically designed and built to give the US total dominance over world trade, by linking all major currencies to the dollar, and then linking the dollar to gold.

That latter linkage has long since disappeared. The dollar nonetheless retains its dominance in world affairs. And by using the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, Americans have been able to maintain a far higher standard of living than they could otherwise have managed. The reason why, as I have explained before – and this is certainly no brilliant insight on my part, I am simply passing on the wisdom of others – is because, when you have the world’s reserve currency, everyone wants it. To get it, they have to sell you stuff, in exchange for your currency. This in turn means it is easy for you to deindustrialise and shed your manufacturing base – you don’t need it when others can manufacture for you. It also means that you can run up GARGANTUAN debts, without consequences, for many decades, because the demand for your money will always be there.

The US is therefore not merely an empire. It is an empire on ten different kinds of anabolic steroids, plus HGH.

However, empires also exist to protect trade. This is true without exception – including with one of the only empires in history that never had a standing army and never conquered territory. That was the Nabatean Empire, based in modern-day Jordan, and it was quite literally a pure trading empire. All empires maintain standing armies and navies specifically to protect trade. Think upon this for a moment and you will quickly realise why this is so. An empire needs immense resources to manage itself. Securing those resources requires force and protection against those who would profit quickly and cheaply by stealing from the empire.

Hence, every empire, EVER, has employed some means of protecting commerce – and the routes of commerce.

The US maintains the world’s most powerful blue-water Navy, and the world’s most potent Air Force (or so they would believe, on both counts), specifically for the purpose of keeping the world’s waterways and overland trade routes free and open. They do this under the guise of this ridiculous “rules-based international order” that Western neoclowns love to bang on about, but the real motivation is actually quite simple. The point of the US military is specifically to keep the world’s critical shipping lanes open.

That includes the Straits of Hormuz, the Straits of Gibraltar, the Suez Canal, the Panama Canal, and a small handful of other absolutely critical choke points for world trade.

The problem, of course, is that Iran has now effectively sealed and blockaded the Straits of Hormuz – through which roughly 20% of the world’s crude oil, and much of its distilled petroleum by-products, sail. And the US Navy is completely IMPOTENT to do anything about it.

This is not an exaggeration. We have seen multiple reports about how the US Navy has received numerous requests – pleas, even – from the Gulf states, and from ship captains of vessels stuck on either side of the Straits of Hormuz, for some kind of escort. The Navy has refused, because the admirals and captains of those ships know perfectly well that the moment they sail a few destroyers and frigates through that narrow channel, they will come directly under the fire of Iranian missiles, autonomous naval suicide drones, and the cheap but very fast mosquito-boats the Persians have built in their thousands.

That is before we get to the very terrifying possibility that the Iranians have managed to build a supercavitating ultra-high-speed torpedo, similar to the old Soviet Shkval design. Such a weapon is impossible to stop – I mean, unless you go by that old adage about how any ship can be a minesweeper… once.

This means the Iranians are in a prime position to dictate terms of global trade and commerce. It also means that the US military has failed to uphold its single most important reason for its very existence – to protect the vital artery of trade and commerce that determines the economic survival of its vassal states.

See, for all the negative press that empires get, there is a REASON why both empires and their vassals generally like that state of affairs. There is a compact between the imperial centre and its “allies”: the centre provides protection, and in return the allies provide food, raw materials, gold, silver, and spear- or cannon-fodder. The centre gets rich from the periphery, to be sure – at least, at first – but it also must invest inordinate amounts of time, money, and effort to bolster the periphery.

And right now, the US is abjectly failing to uphold that compact.

America’s Gulf “allies” have taken clear notice of this. They already ask themselves what the point is of paying for American protection, when the Americans can protect nothing. The Gulf states are in very, very severe economic trouble. They are losing BILLIONS every day this war drags on. The longer it goes, the harder it will be for them to recover. And most of those states are heavily overleveraged to begin with. They have very little by way of economic diversification, too – they rely heavily on oil revenues simply to survive. Several of them have highly restive Shi’a Izzlamick populations, ruled over by hated Sunni royal families. These Gulf monarchies are not stable states – they are simply waiting to go under.

Worse, once oil production stops in the Gulf, it is not a simple matter to restart it. Once an oil extractor or refinery stops, it is NOT a trivial thing to crank it back up again – these things take time, on the order of days or weeks, to reach full capacity and efficiency. Once stopped, the motive energy that keeps such a place running dissipates rapidly, and the very kind of inertia that keeps a city-sized refinery humming when it is busy, now must be overcome to get it started again.

There is no simple or quick fix to such an issue. People who know little about commodity markets (which is to say, most people), do not understand that crude oil is not all the same. There is a REASON why the Brent and West Texas Intermediate benchmark grades go by the name of “light sweet crude”. This means the oil is of a particular grade and quality. Light sweet crude oil is almost translucent – it actually looks a little bit like motor oil, in its highest grades. This is because such oil has very low sulphur content and few minerals and particulates in it.

Refiners love light sweet crude because that lack of contaminants makes it cheap, easy, and simple to refine and distil into all of the various petroleum by-products – kerosene, gasoline, heating oil, and the myriad hydrocarbons that drive our modern economy.

Heavy sour crude, by contrast, is FULL of sulphur and heavy minerals. It takes a lot more effort and time to distil. If you look at it, the stuff is almost like sludge. Venezuelan crude is a particularly gunky and nasty-looking form of heavy sour crude. Russian Urals oil is heavy sour as well, though not nearly as difficult to work with as the Venezuelan stuff.

The point here is that crude oil is not easy to replace, because different grades of crude oil are not easily substitutable. Refineries have to be designed to accept and process specific types and grades of oil. You cannot simply take a refinery designed to crack light sweet crude, and have it start cracking heavy sour. It just doesn’t work that way.

This is a big part of the reason why the crude oil market is global, and why price swings affect crude globally. It does not particularly matter that the US is today an oil exporter, whereas twenty years ago it was an importer, thanks to the shale oil revolution. That shale oil from tar sands and fracking processes, is not the same as the light sweet crude coming out of the ground in Arabia.

The consequence of all of this is that the US is about to enter an era of structurally higher gasoline and energy costs. An increase in the price of crude oil affects EVERYTHING. Most people – myself included – have no clue how many different products come out of the crude oil refining process. Our modern industrial economy quite literally CEASES TO EXIST without crude oil.

This in turn means a massive energy shock to the global economy – at precisely the time when every major Western nation is highly overleveraged, with extreme debt levels in the case of the US, Japan, France, and Britain.

An energy shock means higher inflation. That means higher interest rates. Which then translates into higher debt servicing costs. And eventually, it will mean sovereign debt default.

There is no amount of money printing in the world that can stave off the kind of economic collapse that will come about when overleveraged nations find themselves confronted with cratering consumer demand, high interest rates, high energy prices, declining living standards, and enraged electorates.

This is classic late-stage imperial collapse. This is what happens when the empire can no longer protect and preserve its vital arteries of trade and commerce. The moment that happens, and events show its military to be impotent and incompetent, is the moment when the vassals start to break away. This only hastens and accelerates the collapse, because the sudden loss of resources on the periphery, then starves the centre of the critical elements it needs to survive.

That centre becomes ever more desperate and crazy. The indignities it inflicts on its citizens become ever more perverse and deranged. Eventually, the empire falls, because the ordinary citizens turn away from it and refuse to have anything more to do with this evil.

President Trump 2.0 came into office looking to cement his reputation as the greatest since Reagan. He has instead condemned himself and destroyed his legacy.

It is almost certainly true that he was forced into this war by Nuttanyahoo and the pariah-state that is modern Israel. None of that changes his personal agency and responsibility for the catastrophe that we all now face. He ultimately owns this debacle. It is his fault, and he richly and thoroughly deserves the blame for it.

But the rest of us must suffer for his hubris and stupidity.