Persian Gulf

Unless you're looking to get, you know, unless you're looking to borrow money, I guess.

But you know, the, the impact on goods and I'll caveat this a bit with one of the things that when I look at the situation going on in the Gulf with Iran is they are obviously trying to influence our political system, uh, going into the midterms.

Uh, I've been waiting for them to shut down, uh, the Red Sea and call the Houthis in, if you will, um, for quite some time.

And they seem to have time to say

And kill a lot of people.

And we have decided to change our tack, and we're creating whatever...

A new Persian Gulf and Middle East peace program, blah, blah.

You know, call it whatever.

You know, the very same drone technology Russia is trying to destroy.

in Ukraine and in the Persian Gulf, where Russia assists the Iranians in the killing of our troops as well as the destruction of our bases.

Whether you like it or not, the United States is in fact fighting a cold war against Russia, a cold war that's getting increasingly hotter.

Putin invaded Ukraine and our weapons are being used on the battlefield to kill Russian soldiers.

How does he do it? He's the master of multitasking.

In between negotiating peace with Iran, securing a lasting ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia and a two-state solution for the Palestinians, somehow Jared Kushner still finds time to pluck his eyebrows and stay on top of his private equity firm, Affinity Partners.

The New Yorker this week reporting that while meeting with all the leaders of the Persian Gulf states, you know, to celebrate the opening of Hormuz and that lasting peace with Iran, Jared Kushner was somehow able to raise an additional $5 billion from those very same Persian Gulf leaders who want to invest.

More of their money in his private equity firm, which it turns out spits returns comparable to that of a money market fund.

And what that means is that if you take a look at the Arabian Peninsula on a map, you will see that there's two arteries out of the Arabian Peninsula to the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean, and then to the rest of the world.

And those arteries are the Persian Gulf, the outlet of which is the Strait of Hormuz, and the red sea which has the suez canal at the top of it but then has the bab el mandeb street at the bottom of it both choke points hormuz and el mandeb and what happened was that when trump attend and benjamin netanyahu attacked Iran on February 28th, 2026, Iran very quickly grabbed control of the Strait of Hormuz.

And the Strait of Hormuz had about 20% of the world's oil going through it and about a little bit more than that of the world's fertilizer.

And this has been what Trump has been madly trying to get back is control over the Strait of Hormuz so that Oil could start coming through it again, because right now, for all that Trump is out there insisting that the Strait is open for oil, I don't know who's telling him that, because you can do it yourself.

And the same is true of the Bab al-Mandeb as well, where the Houthis say they're simply at this point shutting off saudi oil and nothing else but the at the same time what happened with the closure of the strait of hormuz is i hope this is useful i have to say it seems a little complicated but i just remember when i was a kid and stuff was happening in the middle east and i didn't know where anything was and i hope you find this useful because it's actually not one of the things about doing history um and doing really any kind of you know, sort of world affairs is that it seems really complicated often because people slap really complicated terms on it.

But in this case, it's actually pretty simple.

After the Iranians started to control the Strait of Hormuz, the Saudis got their oil across Saudi Arabia from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea.

through a pipeline known as the East-West Pipeline.

The running seven-day average is over 10 million barrels a day and on a gradual upward trend.

We will see continued increase in energy flows out of the Arabian Gulf region.

That will not be stopped by any activity Iran does.

Bumps on the road, of course, but those are temporary bumps.

This is not a region where we see significant military capabilities.

Really, I mean, the entire Persian Gulf, does not have, even the Iranians don't have a very powerful standing army.

Most of these countries just don't have the pilots.

They don't have the navigators.

It's quite bad.

I don't think people quite understand how dangerous this moment is.

It's you could actually watch a collapse of the regional order in the Persian Gulf right now.

And, you know, and everybody just keeps cheering that Donald Trump's doing a great job.

Like, whoever told him this in the last week or whatever, like, I feel like they should also be like, "But just so you know, sir, uh, that's gonna, that's gonna make the price of oil itself rip whenever throughput starts to catch up on, on the refinery side." So it's kind of like you're, you're in, in trouble either way.

Like, there, there's not a big winning option until you restore normal flows out of Red Sea and Persian Gulf, period.

Well, the other, the, the, uh, the other issue they've got is the, the...

And part of it's due to the, I think, the nature of the situation itself, and then part of it's due to the fact that [clears throat] you haven't, um, [chuckles] what's the best way to put this? You haven't been the best houseguest, right? And, and wha- wha- why I bring that up is you've got real-life constraints, and you currently...

So we, I mean, we've made life really tough on them, right?

Mm-hmm.

If, if it wasn't for our war here, obviously the Persian Gulf would be fine, but it also wouldn't have led to the Houthi problem that messed up the Red Sea and started getting, you know, their whole country hit.

So now they're like back to a full-scale war with the Houthis.

So as we zoom out here and do a real quick trip around the world, let's go over to the country's in question, right? So center of your screen, we got Saudi Arabia and Oman.

Right now, the Persian Gulf and the Straits of Hormuz, the Gulf of Oman is where all the issues are happening, right? So you got a couple of choices.

Number one is screw the whole Persian Gulf and Straits of Hormuz and let's go take it all the way out on the Red Sea.

Well, that's where the Houthis in Yemen are like, oh yeah, let's start bombing your infrastructure.

So even this external point here going south through the Gulf of Aden and into the Arabian Sea, That now has issues.

It's important as part of the global supply chain because it's all interconnected and we don't buy just fuel.

We buy a lot of other things from the Persian Gulf and the Middle East overall.

And that includes things like helium gas, which I've mentioned previously is using things like MRI scanning and the production of semiconductors.

We buy all sorts of other things that are energy related, but not directly fuel.