The Iran War and the Dollar Endgame: Inside the Next Phase of Global Breakdown

So we're recording this on second, uh, of April 2026, and we're, uh, a little over a month now into the war, uh, in Iran.

And I was just curious to maybe start off, uh, to get your perspective on where we are and where this might be heading.

What is your current thesis or sense making around this war?

Yeah, I think, um, you know, this war was started in this, uh, kind of ill-- what I would say, like an ill-advised first strike, uh, that has quickly ballooned into what is clearly going to have to be a, a much larger involvement, right? The initial 12 hours involved like 900 strikes on, on Iranian targets.

We used our B-2 Spirit stealth bombers, you know, F-22 Raptors.

Um, we had two aircraft carriers, one off the coast of Israel, one in the Indian Ocean, um, and both of them actually had to withdraw for different reasons, um, du-- but one of them was due to the worry about Iranian, Iranian missile strikes during the, uh, during the operation.

Um, but even though we were successful, ostensibly, in, in getting the Ayatollah, uh, and a lot of the major senior leadership killed, um, we're quickly realizing the same thing that we realized in Vietnam and Afghanistan and basically all the other major, uh, conflicts that the US has ensnared itself in in the last, you know, 50, 60 years, which is that simply, you know, beheading the, the head of state of a, of a regime does not solve all the problems overnight.

Because you need-- in order to institute, like, actual change within a country, you need a new reg-regime, and i-if you want that regime to be allied with you, that generally means you have to have boots on the ground and direct input into how they're, how they're leading, how they're running the country.

Um, and so even though the first strikes were successful, and we took out a lot of their, you know, air defenses, um, the Iranians are proving to be a much tougher foe and adversary than was previously imagined.

And, uh, the regime change hasn't come, right? Uh, and unfortunately now I think the Pentagon has, you know, obviously just two days ago, they were authorizing another 3,200, uh, Marines deployed to the Middle East.

Before that, there was another 2,000 to 3,000 on the week before.

Before that, there was about 5,000.

So we're already, um, in the region approaching, you know, in the immediate region, approaching 20,000 or 30,000 active duty service members who are being told that they need to be ready to, to deploy.

Mm.