Trump’s relationship to blowing stuff up around the Persian Gulf is reminiscent of a teen romance, and like with hormonal adolescent drama, everyone around is getting real sick of it.

It’s draining to keep track of what’s happening, and so many people are switching off. I know I am. Our family will be prepping regardless of what Trump posts on Truth Social overnight.

But it’s helpful to have a framework to make reality make sense, and I’ve got some ideas to help you do that.

There are pretty much three takes you could have on Trump. The first is that he’s just a Zionist puppet. I don’t think that’s entirely the case. The second is that he’s just nuts and there’s no plan. I don’t believe that’s the case, either. The third is that Trump has a plan and he’s just not telling us directly what it is.

Let’s go with that assumption and see where it leads.

Trump is an economic nationalist. He has been since he attended the Wharton School of Business in his youth. The Wharton School is famous for its bias toward American industrialism rather than the usual Wall St-friendly financial focus of other prestigious schools. This might give us a clue into what Trump is really up to.

Trump has said since the 80s that he’s basically against ‘globalism’. But what does Trump mean by globalism? His base interprets it to mean he’s against wokeism. I think there’s more to it. I’m not sure Trump understands what wokeism even is.

I think Trump is saying he’s against the postwar settlement established by the American liberal elite in the 1940s. He doesn’t like the Pax Americana, the system of hegemonic imperial influence by which America agrees to become the world’s coast guard and the world, in turn, agrees to price everything in US dollars, all of it underpinned by American control of the world’s commodity markets.

Trump doesn’t like that. He doesn’t like a system that enriches the American elite, offshores American industry, and impoverishes the American people over time. Trump wants to see America building, America manufacturing, America owning, America advancing. America First!

The postwar liberal order isn’t just about ideology. It’s about infrastructure, trade routes, currency systems, and mutual security guarantees. These are all things that Trump has gone after to destroy. He doesn’t want his America to be the global hegemon.

He wants America to be a Western hemispheric territorial empire. Red, white, and blue from Greenland to Venezuela. When Trump speaks, he sounds more like a 19th-century American populist than a 21st-century neoliberal.

If we wanted to put it succinctly, Trump wants to undo everything the American elite since Woodrow Wilson has built. He doesn’t want to spread a New England-style liberal Yankee order across the world. It’s too much obligation, too much gutting of the imperial core to the benefit of elites in other power blocs, too much development of America’s future rivals.

It’s too idealistic. Too touchy-feely. Too damn nice.

Trump wants America to be badass again. This is the theory that can explain Trump’s behaviour. He hates the UN. He hates the WTO. He hates NATO. He hates USAID. He hates the liberal media spreading Yankee globalism around the world.

Trump wants a Maccas drive-thru next to every igloo in Greenland and Chinese riding bicycles again. He wants American companies mining the riches of South America using cheap local labour. He wants to see American cities scrape off the rust, kick out the genetically questionable illegals, and make America feel like Top Gun again.

It’s the Monroe Doctrine but with space lasers. American control of the Panama Canal and the oceans on both sides.

This is a theory to help us explain what Trump is really doing in West Asia. Yes, Trump is being leaned on by the Zionists because he probably did naughty things back in the 80s and 90s and they’ve got it on film. They also funded his campaigns. Sure. How Israel fits into this is something we can flesh out in a sec.

But Trump’s ideology is not Zionism. I don’t believe Trump wants to be remembered as Cyrus 2.0 or whatever. He wants to be remembered as America’s Julius Caesar; the man who took a corrupt, oligarchic republic and turned it into an imperial powerhouse that dominated everywhere around it for another five centuries.

To do that, globalism and its infrastructure must be destroyed. The global trade system has to go, because Trump doesn’t want America policing it anymore. So he puts BILLION PERCENT tariffs on every country in the world, and then he blows up the Persian Gulf and makes the world rearrange itself as cheap energy comes to an end.

Notice how Australia’s PM (whatever his name is) is jetsetting around SE Asia to engage in commodity diplomacy? That’s Trump’s plan working out. The world breaking off into regional power blocs that provide their own security so the US can retreat to Fortress America. Every nation for itself. No more complex global supply chains. That’s the future now that Trump has reneged on the liberal world order of Wilson, Roosevelt, and Kissinger.

Maybe it’s happening because the world system is running up against natural limits. Have we reached peak oil? Peak commodities generally? The world, especially the ‘developed world’, has certainly reached peak debt. The public and private debt in the global system has now become unmanageable. The Australian real estate market is an example. It has to be reset. Is that what Trump is being tasked with managing?

It doesn’t really matter why. It’s happening. Globalism is over. The unwind has begun. No more cheap Temu junk for Aussies. Maybe not many groceries for a while. If you don’t believe me, wait until the May shortages hit. Where does that plastic the milk comes in come from?

This is not a puff piece on Trump, not by a long shot. It’s just my theory of what drives this blowviating reality TV star.

My own personal opinion, for what it’s worth, is that Trump will fail. Sure, he’ll end globalism. But he won’t be able to replace it with a sustainable world order that people will appreciate later. There are too many chaotic forces now being unleashed for a smooth transition to coherent power blocs to occur.

Religion is central to this. Zionism isn’t just a political ideology. It’s grounded in a religious belief system. The Iranian government also controls a political system grounded in religious thinking. Both of those religious systems have an eschatological1 view that not only believes the end of the world is near, but that those countries have a part to play in ending it.

Add in Christian Zionists praying for Israel to start a war with the entire Middle East so Jesus comes back, and you can see how this could get real messy real fast.

Israel has at least 80-90 nuclear warheads. Iran would be mad not to have now cooked up a few in their mountain strongholds. Pakistan has told Iran they will provide them with a nuclear umbrella, which means that should Israel nuke Iran, they will nuke Israel. India, also a nation with a religious government, would be mad to sit back and let Pakistan start shooting off nukes without shooting off a few of their own pre-emptively.

I don’t believe Trump is religious. I don’t think he understands religious people. Pragmatic materialists never do. We religious people think different, and a Middle East without American protection over Israel is a Middle East that Israel will seek to obliterate first to guarantee their own security.

Trump has had a lifelong mission to restore American economic exceptionalism. You can see him talking about it in interviews from the 80s. But it’s not going to happen. We’re not going to see Top Gun. Especially not in Australia.

We’re going to see Mad Max.

It’s quite surreal, really. After the plandemic, the lockdowns, the toilet-paper psyop, and all the associated social engineering, normies still behave as though nothing ever happens.

Trump is just about to start blockading the oil that we were relying on from the Middle East tonight, and the normies are just watching Netflix. How did we become a nation so blase, so cut off from material reality?

This simulacrum of a society that we inhabit began to be constructed in the aftermath of World War II. A social control system was implemented in the Allied nations and then expanded globally in which reality came to be mediated by an elite who saw their orchestrated social engineering as necessary to preserve social order and prevent the horrors of the 30s and 40s from ever happening again.

This Pax Americana was built on three pillars. Firstly, a system of debt-based currency creation that disconnected every level of society from the restraints of physical reality. Social welfare could expand infinitely, parasitic elites could feast infinitely, immigration could pump the house bubble infinitely, and it didn’t matter because there was always new debt enough to pay back the old.

The second pillar was the saturation news and entertainment that has kept us all occupied constantly. Our mental categories have not been our own for a very long time. We’ve been soaking in mind slop for decades.

The third pillar of Boomertopia has been what made it all possible: cheap hydrocarbons. As the normies are going to find out in the coming months, everything we use in the modern world derives somehow from oil.

All three of these pillars are being detonated by the Zionist war against everyone that Israel doesn’t like right now.

We all felt the unreality of it as time went on. The 90s in particular were full of expressions of it: Fight Club, The Matrix, The Truman Show. Each expressed that daily life lacked substance and that life itself lacked meaning, even as we had it materially better than any humans had ever dreamed possible.

Remember how good it was? It was so good.

As long as the shops were full and credit was available, we didn’t think too much about the utter purposelessness and existential ennui of it all. Well, most of us, anyway.

The strong gods of identity, honour, heroism, and nobility had been banished in favour of a simulacrum of reality based upon universalism, materialism, relativism, and the drive-thru.

All three pillars of Boomertopia are being demolished as you read this. The financial system is on the brink. It’s just a matter of moments before a sovereign government declares insolvency or a big bank starts a chain reaction globally. It will all be blamed on Trump, of course, or the Iranians. But it was inevitable.

The authority with which centrally-controlled news and entertainment could manipulate our perception is also slipping away. PM Albanese has been whining recently that people shouldn’t get their views from their phones but instead from the TV, like the Boomers do.

No thanks.

And of course, there’s the oil. That most magical rock juice that is about to remind us how fragile and fleeting our hopes and dreams are.

I don’t know if the people conducting this controlled demolition of the world system have a plan for a new system to replace it. Are we going to experience devastating loss and privation, then be offered the solution of a Palantir-controlled neofeudal dystopia as the remedy? Will we be absorbed by a Han Empire 2.0 and just have to pay tribute to the Jade Comrade in Beijing to be left alone? Or is the world just burning without any plan at all?

Either way, the men without chests running Australia will not have our collective interests at heart. They’ll blame us, filthy plebs, for driving too much or stockpiling or not following the rules.

The puppets in Australia's elite lack the imagination, the fortitude, and the intellectual heft to understand that the end of history has ended. The period during which they could pretend to lead and we would pretend to follow and nothing would go wrong is over. We’re about to become a real country again. That means decisions are about to have consequences again.

Reality is back, and she's bringing with her all the horsemen of the apocalypse.

America is reneging on the postwar settlement under which the US Navy would regulate the seas and the world would become a single debt-based economic system based on the US dollar. Trump is pulling back to Fortress America, and he’s not worried about whether a country like Australia has something as trivial as oil.

As he rageposted on Truth Social recently, we should just go and get our own oil. It’s every nation for itself again now, like it has been throughout most of history.

The local elites in countries like Australia, however, will not be able to adjust to this new reality quickly. It will take time, and probably a crushing military defeat by China and a coalition of our regional neighbours, before we become a serious country again.

Boomertopia is a dying facade. Unfortunately, however, Australia’s ruling caste of apparatchiks are going to try and maintain the illusion as long as they can, and punish anyone who adjusts to the new reality.

And normies still think this is about petrol prices.

At the dinner afterwards, one of the blokes I was chatting to asked me point-blank: “What’s with all you Christians supporting Israel?”

Good question, mate. Good question.

Normies are beginning to ask the question that political elites, church networks, and media institutions have treated as a thoughtcrime for decades. Why are so many Christians willing to risk economic chaos, regional war, and perhaps something even worse for the sake of Israel? Why does every act of Israeli aggression in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, or against Iran arrive wrapped in a moral halo, as though ordinary prudence and ordinary judgment no longer apply?

The answer is not only strategic, though strategy matters. It is not only financial, though money and lobbying matter. The deeper answer is spiritual.

If you want to understand why so many Christians are prepared to blow the world up for Israel, you have to understand Zionism as more than a political programme. You have to understand it as a theology of history.

At the level of present events, Israeli aggression across the Middle East is not simply a series of disconnected military actions carried out under the neutral banner of security. It is increasingly animated by an expansionist ideology that regards land, power, and historical destiny as belonging together. This is why the rhetoric surrounding Israel so often exceeds the language of ordinary statecraft.

A normal state speaks of deterrence, borders, and interests. Zionism, especially in its stronger forms, speaks of inheritance, return, promise, and redemption. What is at stake is not merely the survival of a nation among nations, but the conviction that this particular nation possesses a sacred historical claim which ordinary moral constraints are not permitted to obstruct.

To understand that conviction, we need to distinguish between secular Zionism and religious Zionism. They are not identical, and the former has increasingly yielded to the latter.

The early Zionist movement emerged in nineteenth-century Europe under the pressure of the failure of assimilation. In that context, figures like Theodor Herzl presented Zionism primarily as a political solution to the Jewish question. It was a nationalist project, modern in form and European in method, which sought to make the Jewish people into a normal political nation with territory, sovereignty, and military force. Its grammar was secular, even when it borrowed symbols from Scripture.

But secular Zionism always lived on borrowed capital. It drew emotional and historical power from biblical memory while often detaching that memory from the theological framework that had once governed it. It wanted the language of Jerusalem, exile, and return, yet it translated those realities into the categories of modern nationalism. That tension could not hold indefinitely.

Over time, the older secular model has lost ground to a more explicitly religious one. In Israel itself, the rightward shift has been unmistakable. Biblical promise is no longer treated merely as a civilisational ornament. It is treated as a political warrant. Land is not only strategic. It is sacred. Settlement is a redemptive act; therefore, atrocity is not merely incidental. It is necessary.

This matters because once political claims are made religious claims, compromise begins to look like betrayal. A border dispute can be negotiated. A divine inheritance cannot. That is why right-wing religious Zionism has become such a powerful force not only in Israel, but also among the American political right. Organisations like AIPAC extend this Jewish expansionism into the heart of the American political establishment, particularly on the Republican right.

That is where Christian Zionism enters the picture. The extraordinary power of Zionism in American politics depends upon millions of Christians who have been taught to regard the modern state of Israel as the centre of God’s purposes in history. For these believers, Israel is not simply another state to be judged, criticised, or restrained like any other. It is a prophetic sign. It is the clock by which the end times are measured. It is the stage on which sacred history is expected to reach its conclusion. Once that imagination has taken hold, ordinary political reasoning becomes impossible. War begins to look providential. Escalation begins to look necessary. Catastrophe itself can be interpreted as fulfilment.

The principal theological engine behind this is Dispensationalism. This is a theory of the Biblical end times that gained traction in the 1800s and took over Protestant Christianity in the 1900s. God is said to have one plan for the Church and another for ethnic Israel, with the promises to Abraham remaining nationally and territorially operative in a distinct sense for the Jewish people.

When Israel was established via the Balfour Declaration and the postwar order in 1948, Dispensationalism became the default end-times view for Protestants. From the evangelical or Baptist churchgoer today, criticism of Jesus will be met with a gracious smile. Criticism of Israel will get you burned at the stake.

Trust me, I’ve got the scars.

Religious Zionism is built upon a monumental amount of rabbinic kvetching about the loss of the land. That stream of thought draws upon the Maccabean revolt against the Greeks and the brief period of independence before Roman subjugation ended Jewish self-rule. Europeans are usually referred to by the rabbis as Amalek or Rome. Both are detestable to the religious Zionist, although they are careful not to make that too apparent to us. For now.

The destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, foretold by Jesus and carried out by the Romans, was a devastating blow to Jewish self-image. The final nail in that coffin was in the 130s when the Romans finally genocided the Jews left in Palestine.

John the Baptist and Jesus referred to the Pharisees as serpents and hypocrites, and what we would call ancient Zionism was at the heart of that critique. It was the driving force behind movements like the Zealots and many revolts against Rome. What became rabbinic Judaism saw the land as belonging to the Jews because of their innate ethnic identity. It prevented many of the Jewish people in ancient times from accepting Christ when He came.

This Satanic deception was at the heart of the Jewish rejection of Jesus. When Jesus told them His Kingdom is not of this world, most fell away. When He repeated it in the Temple in his final days, it was enough to make them choose the political terrorist Barabbas and scream, “Crucify Him… His blood be upon us and upon our descendants!”1

Indeed.

That Jewish racial entitlement to the land and belief in innate superiority has never dimmed. It manifests in different religious and ideological ways, but it is at the heart of what it means to be Jewish. Pointing it out gets us into trouble, and I’m not interested in promoting hatred or retribution. But it’s true.

For Christians to go along with Zionism is irreconcilable to our faith. Christian theology is incompatible with Zionism. The New Testament does not permit the old covenantal categories to remain ultimate after Christ. John the Baptist strikes at the root of genealogical presumption when he warns his hearers not to say that Abraham is their father, because God can raise up children to Abraham from stones2.

Jesus carries the same judgment forward. He does not deny Israel’s history. He fulfils it. He is the true centre of God’s purposes, the one in whom Temple, kingdom, and covenant reach their appointed meaning. The kingdom of God is not arriving through ethnonational restoration or territorial maximalism, but through the Messiah who gathers the people of God into himself.

Paul then states the matter with unmistakable clarity. The Seed of Abraham is Christ. That is his argument in Galatians 3:16, and from it the rest follows. If Christ is the Seed, then those who belong to Christ are Abraham’s offspring and heirs according to promise, whether Jew or Gentile. The chosen people of God are not defined by bloodline and land, but by repentance, faith, and union with the Messiah. This is not a marginal apostolic aside. It is the heart of Christianity.

That is why Christian Zionism is not simply a political error. It is a theological inversion. It asks Christians to centre what the New Testament has revealed as peripheral, and to apostatise what the apostles have fulfilled in Christ.

Israel was never a land in the ultimate sense. The land mattered, but it pointed beyond itself. Israel is a people, and that people is gathered in Christ.

That is not ‘replacement theology’. It’s the Bible.

When you’re learning how to write an opinion piece, the usual formula is you start with a news hook, show how it’s relevant to the reader and then link it back to what you really want to talk about.

You’ll see this formula in op-eds all the time. It’s why mainstream news articles, which have become op-eds anyway now, are all the same these days. They pick out a headline designed to trigger an emotional response in the NPC leftist brain, and then they write the same tedious drivel about minority rights, the environment or evil white people they always do. Rinse, repeat.

There’s no need for me to use a news hook for a piece today on World War III. Anyone paying attention knows it’s coming in some form or another. We’re looking at war with Russia in Europe, war with Iran in the Middle East and, eventually, war with China and North Korea in the Asia-Pacific.

Alongside that, the way the oligarchy who control America are treating Donald Trump is making it likely the USA will have a civil war similar to the one between Julius Caesar and the Roman Senate in the 40s BC.

It’s the Fourth Turning in your social media feed. The end times in every Telegram refresh. And we get to see it. What a time to be alive.

I disavow that it is the oligarchy opposing Trump that is leading America into civil war 2.0. The way the Trump administration used ICE to provoke the left, then has done very little to actually deport non-Americans, makes it pretty clear that Trump is playing a divisive role rather than a constructive one.

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It’s easy to get fear fatigue. The normies I know seem to be aware that things are about to fall apart, but rather than analysing the situation and making prudent preparations they’re hiding in a mental bunker and relying upon normalcy bias to convince themselves our near future will be OK.

It will not be OK. Our world is about to get tipped on its head in a way we’ve never experienced in the West. Ever.

So, let’s wargame the way our deep-state oppressors do. Let’s think this out and see what’s likely ahead for us here in Australia and across the West this coming decade.

We can see who the combatants will be in World War III. RINO House Speaker Mike Johnson has just called Russia, China and Iran a new ‘axis of evil’. There’s another assumption I’m going to make that may well bother some people, too.

It’s clearer than ever now that the Eurasian powers are coordinating. Of course, they’ll be rivals again in the future, but for the moment, the common goal of driving the American imperium out of Eurasia is making them comrades.

I think this time America loses. When we consider the factors that made the Allied nations prevail in World Wars I & II - financial superiority, industrial strength, and an overwhelming coalition of forces - then it is clear that the West cannot win this time.

The ‘developed’ Western world is mired in debt and unpayable welfare state obligations. The globalist elite has given Asia our industrial strength, and we will not have a peer ally to gang up with to win this war. The winning hand, this time, is held by the other side.

Barring America pulling out miracles weapons they got from demonic UFO tech at Roswell, we’re going to be 1940s Japan and Germany in the 2030s.

So, let’s see what that might look like.

The recent destruction of American bases and infrastructure in the Middle East as well as the timidity of the US carriers has borne this out. No UFO tech reveal yet, either. Yet.

Mass Islamic terrorism

We’ve already seen in a Sydney church what events in the Middle East are leading to. Whatever your position on the Palestinians, it doesn’t matter. There are a billion Muslims around the world seeing little kids with their limbs blown off on their phones 24/7. That’s creating a consciousness and a hatred that will erupt once the war between Israel and everyone else around them goes live.

You will not want to be living near one of the many Islamic enclaves established in Western cities thanks to open borders policies since the 1970s when that occurs. The security apparatus of the state will be completely overwhelmed. We will be on our own until local private militias can form among non-Islamic communities, such as what we see in South Africa or South America.

Once this kicks off, we can expect Big Sister to resort to lockdowns, curfews, and expanded digital surveillance ‘for our own safety’—almost like a plan.

It’ll be Biblical. Second horseman of the Apocalypse Biblical. Stay safe.

The destruction of Israel

This one is going to bother Christians influenced by dispensational theology, but it’s the most probable event in the Middle East war. Regardless of what your reading of Scripture (and the influence of preachers in turn influenced by the Zionist-funded Scofield Study Bible) has led you to believe, there’s very little chance that Israel can survive another conflict with its neighbours. This becomes even more true once the relative weakness of the American empire is taken into consideration.

Iran’s proxies have already demonstrated they can hobble civilian shipping. The most recent skirmishes between Iran and Israel, too, are demonstrating that the drone and the missile, in sufficient numbers, will always get through. Add in hypersonic missiles, and the US Navy becomes unable to project force outside the Western Hemisphere with any degree of confidence. The carriers will be kept out of range and out of the fight unless the US deep state wants one or two to go down as a Pearl Harbour-style mobilisation tool.

Even then, Israel is glass early on in the fighting. What the Zionist plan for that is, who knows? Religious visions have a way of bringing down destruction on the heads of those who rely on them for victory. Do not tempt the Lord your God.

Not being Jewish, it doesn’t really bother me whether Israel exists or not. What it will lead to, however, is a crisis of faith among Protestant Christians who drank the dispensationalist Kool-Aid. As a Christian, this is of interest to me as it could have a significant impact on the church. It may either lead to a collapse in Christianity in the West or an expansion as the association between Zionism and right-wing politics in the West dissipates. Time will tell.

The way that Netanyahu has been so openly able to force Trump into triggering the war has changed my view here. The average Western normie now sees that Zionism is behind that war. That includes both Jewish and Christian Zionism. Both will get blamed once people lose everything. Severe persecution against the Protestant churches might be a result.

Zionism will be the new Nazism after America loses this war.

Starvation and privation during wartime

This one is hard for us to imagine. Australia is a super-abundant nation, especially considering our relatively small population for our resource base. How could we experience starvation?

If our grid goes down and the products we rely on for manufacturing are suddenly unavailable, that’s how. The deep state has been seeding grid collapse in the public imagination with Netflix shows such as Leaving the World Behind and the BBC’s Cobra. Is this just a fear tactic? Or is it predictive programming to ready the population?

It’s been a long time since Australians were encouraged to grow Victory Gardens. The rationing this time would probably be sold to the public by blaming greedy panic shoppers and hoarders. Was the Great Toilet Paper Emergency of 2020 a trial run to make the public not lose faith in the elites, but rather blame preppers when the Chinese close off fuel and other imports?

No, that sounds like a conspiracy theory, you cooker.

Although the shortages are coming, the trigger I was wrong about. We took oil and shipping for granted. The Chinese won’t even have to destroy the grid to put us under siege. Stopping diesel will do the trick.

Delegitimisation of our current socio-political order

This is what Big Sister fears most, yet it is guaranteed when we lose this war. We will experience ‘regime change’. Our elites will be replaced, and either we will have foreign elites imposed upon us or else members of the upstart counter-elites will be given positions should they accept the new world order.

If it’s the second, I say ‘Nihao!’ to our bright new future.

Our children and grandchildren will be taught that the hegemonic regimes of the Western powers were fascist, imperialist and expansionist. Given that they’re already taught that great-grandpa was a racist coloniser, this won’t be too much of a change.

The peoples of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea are ready to accept such a narrative too, given that those mass mental templates are already in place thanks to postcolonial and communist ideologies. They are part of the worldview taught in their schools.

They’ll just have lost millions of their young people, too. They’ll want revenge.

This will likely go along with feelings of disgust toward Christianity. Christian Zionism will be blamed for its role in starting the war, and as the Islamic world unifies and flexes its strength perhaps under neo-Ottoman leadership and neo-communist Chinese and Russians take primacy on the world stage, Biblical Christianity will come to be widely persecuted.

Many intellectuals and public figures espoused fascism in the 1920s and 1930s. By the 1950s, the only fascists left were feds and informants. This is what happens when you lose a war. You take the fall.

There will likely be a rising antipathy toward those who call themselves Jews today, too. This happened in Germany after World War I. Not having a homeland will make this a highly uncomfortable situation for diaspora Jews. The Jewish ascendancy we’ve seen since the 1940s will be over.

Essentially, whatever beliefs and groups led us into the war will be hated afterward, once we lose.

I think the revolt against liberal democracy will get going after the peak in the war. We’re on the cusp of a global sovereign debt default crisis on top of the war, shortages, and destruction of critical infrastructure. No one’s going to be a democratic socialist once the welfare payments stop, and imperial liberalism will be discredited once it is defeated by the Eurasian autarkies. Globalism will be a distant memory, comrades. Good riddance.

Occupation and fragmentation after the war

America, at least, and maybe Australia, too, can expect to be broken up and fragmented after we lose the war. This occurred to Germany, of course, and to the Koreans when neither side could win the 1950s civil war. Depending on which Asian nations side with China, we can expect parcels of the country to be under foreign control for either a short time or indefinitely. If we’ve been taken out via an EMP attack, this may be done under the guise of a ‘humanitarian response’.

It’s worth noting the devastating psychological impact this can have. Many German men still sit down to pee and the Japanese are famous for looking at softcore anime porn while being unable to leave their bedroom.

Both nations experienced terrible suffering during and after the war, but no one cared because they were the bad guys. That collective trauma has never been able to heal. Should we experience similar, and we will once we’re losing the war, it would alter the Australian psyche permanently.

The locus of world power will shift forever during this war. The Chinese will be the main beneficiaries, as they are sitting back and building up during the early stages of the fighting. This tactic enabled the Americans to emerge supreme in 1945. Smart dumplings.

We see the rising madness in our nation and are disgusted by it. Most people stay quiet due to fear of losing their job, reputation or social standing. The hard times that are coming will purge such duplicity from our society. Bullshit is not tolerated among the rubble. Those hard times will again produce stronger, and hopefully more honest men.

Who unfortunately might sit down to pee.

This I’m not so sure about anymore. Would China be bothered to occupy the place? Then they’d have to take responsibility for it. Maybe they’ll just declare terra nullius and send ‘settlers’. Which is what’s happening already, anyway.

Before it became digits on screens and abstractions in central bank language, it was a claim on something tangible. In the ancient world, money was not first imagined as a free-floating symbol. It referred back to things that could actually sustain life and production such as grain, silver, copper, or livestock. In Mesopotamia, systems of account were tied to measurable stores of value, and across the Bronze Age world, metal objects circulated because value had to remain anchored to something real. A token only mattered if it could still command substance.

That is the first thing modern people forget. Money is not wealth. It is a socially recognised claim on wealth, and it only works for as long as people believe the claim can eventually be honoured. Strip that away and the whole thing becomes theatre.

As Eurasian civilisations expanded, metals became the preferred backstop because they solved the problem better than almost anything else. Grain rots. Cattle die. Land cannot travel. But gold and silver can be stored, weighed, divided, transported, and recognised across frontiers. More importantly, they impose a discipline on rulers and merchants alike. A king can stamp his image onto a coin, but he cannot decree the underlying metal into existence. Material reality still governs the system.

That gave the old world a monetary continuity that outlived dynasties and empires. States rose and fell, borders moved, regimes changed, but the underlying logic of exchange remained coherent because it rested on something outside political wishfulness. Gold and silver were not perfect foundations, but they were foundations.

When Europe expanded across the globe, it did not invent a new monetary order. It exported the Eurasian one.

The conquest of the Americas was not just territorial plunder. It was a vast enlargement of the world’s metallic monetary base. Silver from Potosí and gold from across the New World poured into European systems and then into Asia, binding distant economies into a single expanding order organised around precious metals. Europe did not simply seize land and labour. It imposed valuation. Indigenous systems of exchange and obligation were subordinated to a monetary logic that understood metal as the universal denominator of worth.

By the nineteenth century, that process had matured into a world economy running on gold and silver standards. Paper money existed, but paper was not the foundation. It was the claim. Its credibility depended on convertibility into specie. Exchange rates between major currencies were relatively stable because they all referred back to fixed quantities of metal. Trade could widen because trust had a common substrate.

But there was always a limit hidden inside this arrangement. Gold and silver can stabilise a civilisation. They cannot easily accelerate one.

As economies became larger, denser, and more industrial, the stock of precious metal available to support them became increasingly inadequate. The modern world required more than coins and bullion. It required a far larger architecture of claims on future production, future trade, and future growth. Money had to become less like stored substance and more like a system of layered promises.

This is where modern banking and finance become central. Banks discovered that they did not need to hold enough metal to redeem every depositor simultaneously, because under normal conditions not everyone asks for redemption at once. That gap between actual reserves and circulating claims became the operating space of modern debt-based money creation. Credit could now expand beyond the physical stock of gold and silver.

Once that door opened, the modern world rushed through it. Stock exchanges allowed ownership in future enterprise to be bought and sold. Futures contracts allowed prices to be fixed for goods not yet delivered. Credit networks linked producers, merchants, insurers, investors, and states into increasingly dense structures of interdependence. Economic life ceased to be a simple exchange of existing goods and became instead a system built on anticipated production.

This is what made modernity possible. It is also what made modernity unstable.

Because once a civilisation begins living on claims about the future, it becomes capable of enormous expansion and enormous fragility at the same time. Credit allows a society to build ahead of itself. It also means that when confidence breaks, the whole system can suddenly discover that it has been leaning on expectations rather than reserves.

That is why financial history looks the way it does. Tulip Mania is remembered as a joke about flowers, but the mechanism underneath it was deadly serious. The Australian banking collapses of the 1890s followed the same deeper pattern. So did repeated financial crises across South America. Debt and speculation allowed these systems to stretch beyond their foundations. Collapse came when reality called those claims back in.

That tension between symbolic expansion and material constraint never went away. It simply moved upward into larger systems with larger consequences.

After the Second World War, it was folded into the American order.

Bretton Woods was not merely a tidy monetary agreement between technocrats. It was part of the machinery of Pax Americana. The United States emerged from the war with overwhelming industrial power, huge gold reserves, command of the sea lanes, and the capacity to organise the postwar world around itself. Under Bretton Woods, major currencies were tied to the US dollar, and the dollar itself was tied to gold.

That arrangement preserved the old monetary truth that money required a material anchor while making the United States the gatekeeper of that anchor. Gold remained the final foundation, but the dollar became the instrument through which the world accessed it. And because the arrangement sat inside a much larger system of American power, it worked. The US Navy secured trade routes. American industry supplied a rebuilding world. American institutions provided liquidity and credit. The postwar order was not simply ideological. It was logistical, military, and monetary all at once.

But the contradiction at its core was obvious. The world needed more and more dollars in order to function, because trade was expanding, production was expanding, and the American imperium itself was expanding. Yet every dollar remained, in theory, a claim on a finite quantity of gold.

That could never hold forever.

By the 1960s, the pressure was becoming intolerable. The United States was financing the Vietnam War while also carrying the costs of empire and domestic expansion. Dollars flooded outward into the world economy. Foreign governments accumulated them in vast quantities and began to understand what was happening. There were now far more claims in circulation than could plausibly be redeemed.

This is why 1971 matters.

When Nixon closed the gold window, he did not just tweak a monetary arrangement. He ended the final formal link between the reserve currency and the metallic discipline that had underwritten serious money for centuries. The dollar ceased to be a claim on gold. It became a fiat instrument resting on American power.

But a reserve currency cannot remain dominant purely because a government says so. It still needs a foundation. It still needs a reason for the rest of the world to keep demanding it. Once gold was gone, something else had to replace it.

That something was oil.

This was the real significance of the post-1971 order. Gold had anchored the old dollar. Petroleum would anchor the new one. Under Henry Kissinger, Washington moved quickly to stabilise the broken system by binding the dollar to the one commodity every industrial economy could not do without. Through agreements with the major oil-producing states of the Gulf, especially Saudi Arabia, oil would be priced and sold in US dollars. That meant any country needing energy would need dollars first. Since industrial civilisation runs on energy, demand for the dollar would now be sustained not by convertibility into gold, but by the necessity of purchasing oil.

This was not some incidental diplomatic convenience. It was a structural replacement.

Gold was the ideal monetary anchor for a mercantile world. Oil was the ideal monetary anchor for an industrial one. Gold stores value. Oil moves civilisation.

Oil powers ships, trucks, aircraft, mechanised agriculture, petrochemicals, plastics, mining, construction, and the transport systems that hold modern economies together. It is not just another commodity. It is the concentrated energy source that made twentieth-century civilisation possible. By tying the dollar to oil, the Americans effectively replaced one material foundation with another.

But this new foundation came with a new danger.

Gold can sit inert in vaults for centuries. Oil has to move. It has to be extracted, refined, shipped, insured, defended, and delivered through chokepoints and corridors that are vulnerable to sabotage, war, state collapse, and imperial rivalry. In other words, the post-1971 monetary system did not transcend material reality. It attached itself to a far more volatile part of it.

That is why the Gulf mattered so much. The Gulf monarchies were not merely lucky desert kingdoms sitting atop useful resources. They became custodians of the commodity that now underwrote the monetary order of the industrial world. This gave them extraordinary leverage, and they used it. The fuel crises of the 1970s were not just economic disturbances. They were demonstrations of where real power in the system had shifted. Western economies convulsed because the hidden energetic basis of the monetary order had suddenly become visible.

And this is the environment in which the Iranian Revolution has to be understood.

Iran in 1979 was not simply a country having an internal political crisis. It was one of the key states inside the strategic architecture of the emerging petrodollar order. Under the Shah, Iran had been deeply integrated into the American system in the Gulf. It was part of the machinery linking energy, security, and monetary dominance.

The revolution shattered that arrangement.

The Islamic Republic that emerged was not just anti-Western in a rhetorical sense. It represented a postcolonial revolt against a regional order that had become inseparable from American power and the monetary system that power upheld. Iran sat on enormous hydrocarbon resources, near one of the most important maritime chokepoints on earth, while refusing full submission to the system that had replaced Bretton Woods.

That made it intolerable.

So Iran was punished. The Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s bled it heavily, with Iraq receiving backing from the United States. Sanctions followed. Isolation followed. Decades of economic strangulation followed. Iran was not simply being disciplined for bad behaviour. It was being contained because it occupied a structurally dangerous position inside the energy geography of the American world order.

That reality has not changed. It has only become more dangerous.

And this is why the present moment matters.

When Iran attacks oil infrastructure, shipping routes, and the wider energy architecture of the region, then it is not merely retaliating in the ordinary military sense. It is striking at the actual foundation of the post-1971 system. It is reaching beneath speeches, alliances, and diplomatic noise and touching the load-bearing structure itself.

Because beneath all the abstractions of modern finance, the American monetary order still rests on the same proposition it adopted after Nixon severed the link to gold. The dollar remains central because the industrial world still runs on hydrocarbon energy priced and moved through systems organised under American predominance.

That is the real backstop and Iran is now hitting it with missiles.

This does not mean the system collapses tomorrow. Large systems rarely fail in one dramatic gesture. They weaken through repeated stress. Shipping becomes more expensive. Insurance becomes more expensive. Energy volatility bleeds outward into inflation, capital markets, and political instability. Every disruption can be managed in isolation. But management is not the same as durability. A system that must constantly absorb shocks at its foundation is not stable. It is simply not dead yet.

What matters is that the hidden mechanism is becoming visible again.

For decades, people in the developed world have been encouraged to think of money as something generated by central banks and sustained by confidence alone. But confidence is never the foundation. It is only the surface effect of deeper material realities. Under every serious monetary order lies a substrate that cannot be negotiated with.

For centuries, that substrate was precious metal.

After 1971, it became concentrated energy.

And that means the ghosts of the 70s are not historical curiosities. They are still alive inside the system because the problem was never solved. Gold was removed, but the need for a foundation remained. Oil took its place. Now that foundation is under attack.

Trump is being haunted by the same reality that earlier generations of American strategists wrestled with. They created the illusion of stability we’ve taken for granted ever since.

Unfortunately, reality is not Trump’s strong suit. His inability to deal with it will haunt Americans for a very long time to come.

Given that he’d already set up a ‘task force’ committee, this was the only card he had left to play. He fearlessly declared that the government will change export-finance laws so that oil importers can get subsidies from the taxpayer to delay the inevitable moment of reckoning from Iran’s strategy of squeezing America’s vassals by the cajones via oil.

Not only was it brave. It was also stunning.

The phrase “Potemkin village” comes from the old Russian story that Prince Potemkin built fake villages to impress Catherine the Great as she travelled through newly conquered territory. Whether the original story is fully true is almost beside the point. It survived because it names something real. A Potemkin village is a facade. A front. Something built to look solid from a distance while hiding how little is really there underneath. Which is why the image fits Russian political culture so well, all the way through to the Soviet world of propaganda, parades, heroic posters and films like Battleship Potemkin. The point was not just power. The point was to make power look convincing when reality fell short.

A country the size of Australia should not be scrambling for an extra few weeks of diesel.

Australia is not Singapore. It is not Malta. It is not some cramped little import-dependent city-state with no room, no resources and no strategic depth. It is a continent. It is rich in energy, rich in raw materials, and built around vast internal distances that only function because liquid fuel makes those distances traversible.

And yet, not long ago, Anthony Albanese was effectively forced to ease diesel quality rules because the country needed a little more breathing room.

That should have been treated as a national embarrassment. Instead, it was treated as heroic government by the establishment media.

That is the part worth noticing. Not just the diesel issue itself, but the way it was absorbed into the normal rhythm of Australian politics, as though this is simply what leadership looks like now. A policy setting quietly creates fragility. The fragility starts becoming inconvenient. The government adjusts the setting slightly. The media reports this as calm crisis management. As Churchillian. Then the news cycle moves on.

But if you stop and look at it properly, it tells you something important.

Diesel is not some obscure technical issue. It is not one more line item in a policy briefing folder. It is what moves the country. It runs the trucks. It runs the farms. It runs the machinery that sits behind the machinery. In a place like Australia, diesel is not optional. It is one of the things that turns geography from a liability into the basis of our way of life.

Which is why this sort of thing matters.

If a country like Australia is suddenly discovering that fuel policy has consequences, then the problem is not really fuel policy. The problem is that the people running the country no longer seem to think in material terms. They think in administrative, moral, media, and symbolic terms. But not in the older, harder language of industrial reality.

That is the thing modern politicians seem least able to understand. A civilisation does not continue because it has the correct values statement. It continues because the physical systems underneath it continue to work. Our civilisation continues in its current form because fuel and spare parts arrive, freight moves, food can still be produced, transported, and sold, and distance can still be overcome at scale.

Australia, more than most countries, depends on that.

We are not a compact little European state with rail lines, density and inherited redundancy built into the landscape. We are a very large place held together by movement. Remove enough movement, or make it sufficiently unreliable, and what begins to break down is not just commerce but societal coherence.

That is why the whole diesel episode was so revealing. It showed, very briefly, that the people in charge do not really govern the Australia that exists. They govern a kind of administrative fiction layered over the top of it. An Australia of targets, frameworks, optics and announcements. An Australia where reality is something to be narrated, not secured.

That works for a while. It’s worked for them for quite a long time, given that we have spent the last few decades moving through a historical period of relative stability and American imperial economic expansion after the crisis of World War II and the detente of the Cold War. As American power stretched across the globe and the American imperial ideology is based on (a predatory and usurious form of) free trade, the political class in Australia became less and less leaders and more and more administrators. Everything was optics, my fellow working Australian battler.

Albanese’s fuel announcements this week were less the actions of a serious state than the improvisations of a political class that still thinks governance means explaining away consequences after they arrive. That is the pathology of modern Australian leadership. These people were not formed by scarcity, risk or hard constraint. They were formed by faction rooms, media cycles and the sort of undergraduate debating society culture that mistakes verbal fluency for competence. So when reality finally intrudes in the form of diesel, reserves, shipping and strategic vulnerability, they do what they have always done. Reframe, reassure, and hope nobody notices that the adults never really turned up.

That, in the end, is what a Potemkin politician really is. Not simply a liar, and not even simply a coward, though there is usually enough of both. A Potemkin politician is something more specific. He is a man produced by a fake world and perfectly adapted to surviving inside it. He knows how to look official, how to sound measured, how to gesture toward responsibility while standing in front of hollowed-out systems he neither built nor understands. He is not there to preserve the underlying reality. He is there to maintain confidence in the facade for as long as possible.

And Australia is now full of them.

We are ruled over by people whose entire formation took place in an era where almost nothing truly hard was allowed to touch them. No real scarcity. No real strategic terror. No genuine confrontation with the fact that civilisations are made of physical things that can fail. They have lived inside a padded historical chamber where every problem could be turned into a media event, a values statement, a task force, a subsidy, a slogan, or a ministerial reshuffle. That is why they still behave like undergraduate debating club apparatchiks even while sitting at the controls of a vulnerable industrial society. They think words are steering mechanisms. They think optics are ballast. They think reality can be indefinitely managed by tone.

But reality is not interested in tone.

It does not care how compassionate, progressive, moderate, inclusive or technically compliant a government sounds while it quietly weakens the foundations beneath the country. It does not care how many committees are formed or how many media hits are done or how many little rhetorical sandbags are piled around the latest failure.

If the diesel does not arrive, the diesel does not arrive. If the reserves are thin, the reserves are thin. If a nation has spent decades hollowing out its own resilience while pretending this was moral advancement, then eventually the bill arrives and there is nobody left to hide behind except the same thin, theatrical men who created the problem.

That is the real danger now. Not just Albanese, not just Labor, not just one fuel scare, one shipping disruption, or one panicked week in the market. The deeper problem is that Australia is entering a harder world with a ruling class trained entirely for a softer one. A world of constraints, shocks, shortages, pressure points and consequences is beginning to return, and we are being led into it by people whose highest skill is still explaining why none of this is really their fault.

Potemkin politicians can survive almost anything except the moment the facade stops being load-bearing. They can survive scandal, mockery, bad polling and televised embarrassment because all of that still belongs to the same artificial world that produced them.

But they cannot survive a system that begins to fail in ways that cannot be narrated away. Because at that point the question is no longer what they say, but what still works. And that is where the illusion collapses. Not all at once, not dramatically, but in small, accumulating failures that reveal, piece by piece, that the people in charge were never really in charge at all.

It was January 24, 2020. I remember the date because it’s the date of our first ever date. She’s adamant our first date was January 23, but she’s wrong. I’m right.

I showed her the videos on Twitter of people falling over in the street in China and the bodies being incinerated, which were circulating just as Wuhan went into a ‘lockdown’ due to a mystery new illness.

Alert but not alarmed, we got online to buy face masks and PPE, only to find out that there were already none easily available in Australia. Chinese had bought it all up and sent it back home before the gweilo realised what was happening.

That’s when the urgency kicked in and we realised we were dealing with something that was going to become significant. I’d had preps on and off for ten years prior, but it was then that I started taking prepping seriously and I haven’t stopped since.

Let’s just say we’re good for tp for a while.

As it turned out, COVAIDS was just a weird engineered mutant flu that got itself mysteriously cancelled out by the Omicron variant. It was all a scam. People lost jobs, though. Lost social connections. The young have never fully recovered their oomph, I think. It’s cast a pall on societies and individuals ever since.

And all that time, throughout late January and February 2020, the politicians appropriated the response and told the public there was nothing to worry about. It was a protracted masterclass in mass gaslighting. Instead of providing as much clear and accurate information to the public as possible and letting people manage their own responses, the political elite appropriated all messaging and management to themselves and then manipulated, deceived, divided, bullied, and terrified the population, rather than substantively addressing the problem.

They pretended to do border closures after they’d let the planes keep coming from China. Then they called anyone who said to close the border a racist. Then they closed the borders, and called anyone who wanted to go visit their dying nanna in Tassie a cooker conspiracy theorist threat to public safety.

Australia has intelligence agencies. They’re not smart people, but they get a lot of funding. There is no way they didn’t know about COVAIDS in the second half of 2019. They probably know who created and released it. For all we know, the Five Eyes created the entire thing.

Yet they pretended it was nothing, then they pretended to be investigating, then they pretended to be not alarmed while they launched economic warfare on the population, then they pretended that anyone who didn’t enforce mass terrorism and get an experimental mystery needle was literally Osama bin Laden.

And they’re doing exactly the same thing now, however, this time it’s about a real threat. Alarmism aside, Australia without diesel, fertilisers, and unleaded is not the Australia we know anymore. It’s somewhere between Afghanistan and Argentina, and fast.

Add in the likely opportunistic attack by China and the very likely use of nuclear weapons as Israel comes under existential threat, and it’s about to get real spicy.

If we know that, they know that. If we’re prepping, they’re prepped.

The same playbook is being rolled out in Australia that was used in 2020. While Asian nations are making radical preparations to protect their domestic populations, the Australian government is jawboning and gaslighting to bide the time. They want the crisis to engulf the population so they can pretend to rescue us and tighten the leash.

It’s classic narcissistic behaviour because we’re ruled by narcissistic sociopaths.

It’s difficult to get a clear picture, but from what I can tell, we hit the wall in Australia about April 10-15. If you have a different timeline or a different viewpoint, let me know in the comments. I don’t want to mislead anyone. Yet that’s the baseline scenario our household is planning for.

So in about two weeks, the S is going to hit the F. Big time. Not just fuel shortages. Everything shortages. The normies will panic last instead of first, like they always do, then the elites will use the chaos and the pain to push through social engineering plans they’ve had for a long time. Friends of mine think they’ll do lockdowns. I’m not so sure. Why lock us down when we’re stuck and starving? They might be right, though. We’ll see.

As soon as Trump attacked Iran for the Zionists, Anthony Albanese should have called a press conference and laid out to the nation what was coming. We could have requisitioned supplies, made the transition to domestic self-sufficiency, and prepared the population mentally. Shops would have been stripped, but that’s going to happen anyway.

We could have begun to organise community seed banks. A national system of Uber-style community ridesharing to encourage EV owners to get ready to help out neighbours while being incentivised through appropriate remuneration. A national mobilisation effort that was bottom-up and community-based, that would have brought the nation together beforehand, rather than a strategy that seeks to tear it apart afterwards.

Instead we’re going to have divide-and-control strategies that seek to demonise anyone who got ready beforehand or who isn’t going along with the agenda.

It’s all so diabolically evil. The deep state and their puppet masters would have perfect information about this crisis. They’d know what Trump and Iran are going to do. They’d have mapped out the probabilities. Instead of using that insider information to best prepare the nation collectively, they’re feigning calm to ensure the tsunami engulfs us when it arrives.

They must think it’s so funny. Iranian content creators are calling the Western elite the ‘Epstein class’. It’s very clever propaganda. The released emails show a network of people defined by their nihilism, debauchery, arrogance, and delusion. These are the people who are about to use World War III to commandeer our lives.

There’s a certain type of person who confuses cleverness with dishonesty. They think they’re smarter than everyone else because they routinely deceive. These people have unfortunately risen to the top.

Even more unfortunately for us, the only thing they’re good at is lying.

Just in time for TACO Tuesday, Trump chickened out. The Iranians have power, for now, and the greatest war crime of the 21st century hasn’t been carried out.

The greatest war crime of the 21st century remains Gaza. For now.

Once Trump does destroy Iran’s power grid, and I expect that he will given that this is what America always does before launching an invasion, then he will create the greatest humanitarian disaster since World War II and send a tsunami of Islamic refugees into Europe.

This has been the pattern every time America has attacked Middle Eastern countries since 9/11. Americans bleed, Muslims emigrate, Europe gets rapefugees, and Israel expands its sphere of influence.

Every single time.

Right when the dramatic 48-hour period that had the world on edge was up, Trump posted this.

Whoever this ‘country of Iran’ is, the leaders of the Iranian government and the IRGC have no idea what Trump is talking about. Given that Trump and Netanyahu have murdered just about every guy who could have negotiated a ceasefire, including the parents, wife and children of the new ayatollah, it’s highly unlikely Trump is talking to anyone.

Five days after the second message just happens to be Saturday, when the markets have closed. As he’s done many times before, Trump is clearly hoping to time whatever hairbrained, foolish, delusional, mad thing he’s going to do against Iran to be absorbed as news before markets open the following week, thus keeping oil low and the DOW up.

If he can’t pull it off, there will surely be some insiders around the Trump family who will make squillions off the event via insider trading anyway.

It’s the TRUMP coin rugpull all over again, but with more death and destruction.

When dealing with a grandiose pathological liar like Trump, it’s vital to never listen to what they say. That’s the siren song to distract you. Instead, watch what they do. Then you’ll see what they’re really up to.

As of writing, US forces are being moved toward the Middle East. Not a massive number at this stage, but enough to indicate that boots are about to hit the ground in Persia.

The clearest tell is the movement of command elements linked to the 82nd Airborne. You do not reposition airborne command structures into a theatre because negotiations are progressing. You do it because the system is being arranged for options that may soon need to be exercised at speed. War rarely begins with a formal announcement. It begins with logistics, staging, escorts, command integration and the quiet preparation of force.

This is the lesson of the magisterial World War I history, the Guns of August: once mobilisation begins, wars are hard to stop. And Trump is mobilising.

There are enough movements into West Asia to suggest that Washington is preparing for more than a symbolic strike package. The likely focus is not Tehran in the abstract, but the narrow band of strategic infrastructure that actually matters to the world economy, namely oil and gas facilities, maritime chokepoints and above all the Strait of Hormuz. That is where the pressure point is. If the Strait is no longer secure, then the fantasy of a stable, functioning global economy begins to fracture very quickly.

That is also why the most likely scenario is not some grand invasion of Iran in the Iraq sense, but a narrower operation that still carries enormous risk. Special forces, marine or amphibious elements, and seizure or destruction missions around energy and shipping infrastructure are far more plausible. Washington will tell itself this can be contained. It always does. But once American troops are on the ground, even in limited numbers, the logic of escalation takes over. Iran is not some shattered post-state waiting to be disciplined. It is a large, armed, coherent regional power that has spent decades preparing for this exact confrontation.

And that raises the darker possibility. If American troops are hit hard in the opening phase, that will not necessarily be treated in Washington as a warning to pull back. It may instead be treated as the emotional pretext for a much larger war. That has happened before. A failed limited mission can become the thing that transforms a reckless operation into a national crusade. Mission creep is not an accident in American war-making. It is often the mechanism through which political hesitation is converted into total commitment.

The problem for the United States is that once it goes down that road, it enters the old imperial trap. It cannot leave without humiliation, but it cannot stay without bleeding itself dry. A prolonged war with Iran would not restore American authority in West Asia. It would expose how thin that authority has become. And once that weakness is visible, other powers will begin testing it elsewhere. China will watch. Russia will watch. North Korea will watch. The rest of the world will begin adjusting to the fact that American power still has destructive capacity, but less and less ability to impose durable order.

That has obvious implications for Israel as well. A wider war may buy time tactically, but strategically it risks placing Israel in a much more dangerous position. If the region enters a prolonged phase of open combustion while American power is overextended and politically brittle, then Israel is no longer sitting beneath an unquestioned imperial shield. It is sitting inside a regional furnace.

And back in the United States, the domestic consequences would begin arriving very quickly. Not all at once, and not necessarily in dramatic form, but in the familiar pattern of imperial overstretch. Shortages, energy shocks, inflation, emergency language, heightened surveillance, pressure for sacrifice and the gradual normalisation of a war footing in a society that has neither the discipline nor the cohesion to absorb it cleanly.

That is why even the smaller signals matter. The recent expansion of military eligibility in the US up to the age of 42 with drug convictions not a barrier any longer does not prove a draft is imminent. But it does suggest a system trying to widen the manpower pool at exactly the moment strategic risk is rising. That is not proof of what comes next. It is simply one more indication that the state is beginning to prepare for a larger burden than the public is aware is coming.

So stop listening to Trump and start watching the machinery.

He is lying for time.

He is lying to keep markets calm.

He is lying to keep the public passive while the physical architecture of war is moved into place.

And if this does become what it increasingly looks like it may become, then people should not be preparing for a dramatic television event. They should be preparing for a slow deterioration in the conditions that underpin ordinary life. Shortages, price shocks, possible conscription pressure, travel disruption, civil unrest, and the gradual collapse of the assumption that the Western world is stable, rich and insulated from history.

That assumption was always more fragile than it looked.

And just like the price of oil, lying can only keep it under control for so long before reality catches up.

South Pars was hit. That matters because it is not just another energy asset, but the largest gas field in the world and a load-bearing part of regional and global supply. Iran’s response followed the same logic. Ras Laffan in Qatar, one of the central nodes of global LNG export, was struck hard enough to remove a significant portion of capacity. Around it, the pattern has filled in quickly. Tankers are getting harassed or redirected. Insurance markets are tightening. The Strait of Hormuz is no longer a neutral conduit but a variable one.

None of this is accidental. The infrastructure is not collateral damage. It is the target.

What these events make visible is something that is otherwise easy to miss when systems are working as they should. Modern societies do not rest on stockpiles so much as on movement. Energy moves. Goods move. Data moves. Capital moves. People move (unfortunately). The appearance of stability arises because these movements are sufficiently continuous to feel like a given. When they begin to stutter, even slightly, the underlying structure starts to show.

Industrialisation did more than increase output. It reorganised life around throughput. Energy-dense fuels allowed production to scale, but that scale required coordination across distance. Globalisation extended that coordination outward, so that inputs, components, and finished goods are now routinely separated by oceans. Centralisation then narrowed the number of places where key processes occur. Fewer refineries were doing more work. Fewer ports were handling more volume. Fewer facilities were producing what entire regions depend on.

And all of it was made possible by the global policeman role of the US Navy.

That combination works exceptionally well under stable conditions. It is fast, efficient, and in normal times surprisingly resilient to small, local disruptions. But it has a particular weakness that becomes obvious once pressure is applied across more than one part of the system at the same time. It does not have much slack.

I can remember my grandparents talking about how their parents had a goat, chooks, and a veggie garden in the backyard. My grandparents had decorative plants. My parents had a pool. At our place, we’re back to chooks and a permaculture garden.

The point is, earlier societies lived much closer to their points of production. They were exposed to scarcity in ways modern populations would find intolerable, but their systems were also less tightly bound together. A failed harvest was devastating, but it did not usually propagate through an entire civilisation at speed. Famines were localised. Disruption travelled slowly and usually petered out, unless it was a global catastrophe event.

Modern systems do not behave that way. They are integrated by design. Fuel underwrites transport. Transport underwrites food distribution. Electricity underwrites water, communications, refrigeration, and payments. Data systems coordinate all of it. When one layer is strained, others begin to tighten. When several are strained together, the system does not absorb the shock so much as transmit it.

This is what “critical infrastructure” really means in practice. Not just important assets, but the narrow set of systems through which everything else has to pass: energy fields and refineries; LNG terminals; major ports and shipping lanes; substations, fibre networks, data centres; and financial clearing systems. They are efficient precisely because they are concentrated. That concentration is also what makes them difficult to replace and slow to repair.

Once you see the system in those terms, the recent pattern of attacks no longer seems baffling or bizarre. War is no longer only, or even primarily, about seizing territory. It is about interfering with function. You do not need to occupy a country to make it hard to live in. You need to make its systems unreliable to apply pressure to the elite you are trying to destroy.

The United States spent the better part of the past two decades demonstrating this in various forms. Sanctions that reach into the plumbing of global finance. Targeting of energy infrastructure. Cyber operations against industrial systems. Control of shipping and insurance regimes. The lesson, whether intended or not, was clear. Modern power can be exercised by shaping the flows a society depends on.

Others have absorbed that lesson. They do not need to reproduce it perfectly or in coordination for it to have an effect. Pressure on shipping routes, energy production, key industrial nodes, and the digital systems that coordinate them can accumulate even when applied from different directions. The system does not care whether the strain is centrally planned. It only registers that it is there.

What follows is not an immediate collapse in the cinematic sense. Systems tend to degrade before they fail. Deliveries arrive late, then irregularly. Prices move first, then availability. Workarounds are found, but they are less efficient and put pressure elsewhere. Firms begin to prioritise, households begin to adjust, and governments begin to reassure. The system continues to function, but with increasing friction, and with a growing difficulty in predicting how it will behave from one week to the next.

There is also a tendency among political and managerial classes to misread this phase. A system that is still functioning is taken as evidence of resilience. But systems designed for efficiency under stable conditions often have very little margin once those conditions change. Redundancy was removed because it appeared uneconomic. Now that US hegemony is waning, it is showing that inefficiency was resilience.

The question this raises is not simply who can strike harder, but who can continue to function under sustained pressure on their infrastructure. Industrial civilisation has traded a great deal for its speed and scale. It has traded storage for flow, locality for reach, and redundancy for efficiency. Those were rational trades in a world where the underlying conditions were assumed to be stable.

The events of the past fortnight suggest that those conditions can no longer be taken for granted. The infrastructure that made modern life possible is now also the most direct way to disrupt it. That is not a temporary feature of this particular conflict. It is a property of the system itself.

Collapse, when it comes, is unlikely to announce itself with a single decisive break. It will present first as irregularity. Systems that work, but not quite as they did. Gaps where there used to be continuity. A growing sense that the machinery is still running, but no longer under control. And then, at some point that is difficult to time in advance, the transition from strain to failure.

It is the strategy of the China-Russia-Iran-North Korea, and I’m sure they’re all coordinating this, to leverage our fragility against us to maximum devastating effect.

Trump now has a choice. He can either retreat or invade Iran. There are really no other options.

A retreat would signal the end of US hegemony globally. The Eurasian powers seeking to end the Pax Americana would smell blood. There would be regional warfare around Eurasia very quickly, i.e. World War III.

An invasion would be a bloodbath for American troops. Jimmy Carter tried to use Delta Force to rescue the embassy hostages in 1979, and it was a disaster. A larger, overt attack to capture the processing facilities in the Persian Gulf would be a catastrophe. Mission creep would kick in, and even if the soldiers could take the facilities, more troops would have to then go in to capture the entire oil and gas production systems. America would bleed out, the Eurasian powers would pounce on the weakness, and there would be regional warfare everywhere soon after. World War III again.

Trump’s handlers clearly wanted a catastrophic war, likely a nuclear war, and now they’ll get one. As I’ve written before, I believe they are motivated by eschatology.

Trump is doomed if he doesn’t and doomed if he does. And so is our critical infrastructure.

Rows of fruit in perfect colour. Meat sealed in tidy packages. Bread stacked in quiet abundance. Freezers full of meals from cuisines most people would not have recognised two generations ago. Forty thousand products under bright lights, available seven days a week.

It is one of the quiet miracles of modern civilisation.

We rarely think about it anymore.

But the abundance resting on those shelves depends on something most shoppers never see.

Oil.

Not metaphorically. Literally.

Modern food is, in a very real sense, rearranged petroleum.

For most of human history, agriculture ran on three energy sources: sunlight, human muscle, and animal muscle.

A farm in medieval Europe was essentially a solar energy system. Crops captured sunlight through photosynthesis. Animals converted those crops into labour. Humans organised the work and hoped the weather cooperated.

Productivity was low. Harvests were uncertain. Entire communities could be pushed into crisis by a single failed season.

Agriculture produced food, but it did so slowly and precariously. Then fossil fuels entered the field.

The first transformation was mechanical. Horses and oxen gave way to tractors. Irrigation pumps driven by diesel replaced the limits of rainfall. Mechanical harvesters replaced large armies of seasonal labour.

The scale of farming expanded dramatically. One farmer who once fed a household could now feed a village. In many modern economies, a single farmer produces enough food to sustain more than a hundred people.

Cheap energy did not simply transform industry. It transformed the farm.

The deeper revolution, however, came from chemistry.

Modern agriculture depends heavily on nitrogen fertiliser produced through the Haber–Bosch process. The chemistry itself pulls nitrogen from the air and converts it into ammonia that crops can absorb. But the process requires enormous energy inputs, and those inputs come overwhelmingly from natural gas.

The result is a quiet but extraordinary fact. A substantial share of the world’s food supply is effectively produced by the natural gas industry.

Estimates vary, but many researchers suggest that roughly half of the global population is fed by crops grown using synthetic fertiliser.

The Green Revolution was not purely agricultural. It was petrochemical.

Modern farming is therefore not simply a biological activity taking place in fields. It is part of a much larger industrial system.

Tractors the size of small houses cultivate land using satellite guidance. Diesel pumps draw water from deep aquifers. Fertiliser factories operate hundreds or thousands of kilometres away from the farms that depend on their output.

A medieval farmer needed a plough and a horse. A modern farmer requires diesel deliveries, replacement parts manufactured in global supply chains, fertiliser plants powered by natural gas, and transport systems capable of moving enormous volumes of crops across continents.

The farm has become an industrial site that happens to grow plants.

And industry runs on energy.

Now widen the lens beyond the farm itself.

Modern food systems assume that distance is cheap.

Beef travels from Brazil to European markets. Soy grown in Argentina feeds livestock in China. Apples harvested in New Zealand appear in northern supermarkets long after local orchards have gone dormant.

In the late nineteenth century, refrigeration changed the meaning of distance in food. Before that, meat was either eaten locally or preserved by being salted, dried, or smoked. Freshness did not travel. The breakthrough came with mechanical refrigeration and the first successful refrigerated shipping lines, which allowed frozen and chilled meat from Australia and New Zealand to reach British markets in usable condition. That was not just a commercial innovation. It was a sanitary one. Cold did what distance and time had always undone: it slowed bacterial growth, stabilised food, and made it possible to handle, store, and transport perishable goods without rapid spoilage. Modern food safety, the expectation that meat can sit in a cabinet for days without becoming dangerous, rests on that cold chain.

But refrigeration is not an independent system. It is an energy system. From the earliest ammonia compressors driven by coal-fired engines to modern refrigerated containers powered by diesel generators and electricity grids, the cold chain has always depended on abundant, continuous energy. Every refrigerated warehouse, every supermarket freezer, every chilled truck is a small, ongoing claim on the same underlying fuel base. Remove that energy, and refrigeration does not degrade gracefully. It stops.

The global food system is not merely agriculture. It is a vast logistical network that spans the planet. Container ships move grain across oceans. Refrigerated trucks distribute food across national highway systems. Fertiliser travels thousands of kilometres before it ever reaches a field. Oil made those distances economically manageable. In effect, cheap energy turned the world into one interconnected farm.

But distance has a way of returning when the cost of energy rises.

Even inside the supermarket itself, the system depends on speed rather than stockpiles. Most stores hold only a few days’ worth of inventory. This is not recklessness. It is the logical outcome of a supply chain optimised for efficiency. Food moves continuously through a chain that rarely stops. It moves from farm to processor, from processor to distributor, and from distributor to supermarket. Efficiency keeps prices low and shelves full. It also removes the buffers that once protected the system from disruption. When the flow slows, the shelves empty quickly.

Efficiency is a remarkable achievement. But it is not the same thing as resilience.

One way to understand the transformation of agriculture is through the language of energy. Traditional farming largely ran on solar income. Industrial farming runs on sunlight organised by fossil fuels. Fertiliser production requires natural gas. Farm machinery consumes diesel. Food processing, refrigeration, packaging, and long-distance transport all draw energy from the same industrial system.

And this is where the present moment stops being abstract. In the past few days, the war in the Middle East has moved beyond threats to actual damage. Iran’s strike on Qatar’s Ras Laffan complex has knocked out roughly 17 per cent of Qatar’s LNG export capacity, with two LNG trains reportedly damaged badly enough to be offline for years. Before that, Israel struck Iran’s South Pars gas field and the Asaluyeh processing hub attached to it. Trump then warned Iran against any repeat strike on Qatar, while reports elsewhere described an explicit threat against the rest of South Pars. This is not diplomatic theatre. It is the targeting of the machinery that keeps global energy moving.

That matters because modern agriculture is downstream from all of it. Natural gas is not just something that heats homes. It is the feedstock for fertiliser. When LNG capacity is destroyed, when gas fields are hit, when shipping risks rise, and cargoes are redirected, fertiliser costs move with them. Oil does the same work elsewhere in the system. It powers farm machinery, road freight, shipping, and cold storage. What begins as a strike on energy infrastructure quickly becomes a rise in the cost of producing food.

You can see it already, in small ways. A few cents more at the bowser. A missing brand on a supermarket shelf. Nothing dramatic. Nothing that looks like a crisis.

That is how these things begin.

But take the worst-case scenario seriously for a moment. Not as a thought experiment, but as a baseline.

Australia sits in an especially brittle position. It exports enormous volumes of LNG, yet the infrastructure to direct it locally quickly does not exist. And LNG is not a substitute for oil.

Petrol stations run dry first. Panic buying will empty the system even before the boats stop arriving.

No fuel, no logistics. No logistics, no supermarkets. It is a brutally simple chain.

The initial shock is psychological as much as physical. Households do not wait for empty shelves. They anticipate them. They buy early, buy more, and strip the system of its buffer. What looked like a supply problem becomes a behaviour problem, which then becomes a real supply problem.

It’s an unstoppable feedback loop once confidence disappears.

After that first shock, the deeper damage begins.

Fertiliser supply tightens hard enough that farmers pull back immediately, not cautiously. Application rates drop across an entire planting cycle. That decision is invisible to most people at the time. Fields still look the same. Tractors still move.

But agriculture runs on delayed consequences. What is not put into the soil now is not harvested later.

At the same time, diesel, if available at all, becomes scarce enough to change behaviour. Marginal land is not planted. Harvesting decisions become selective. Transport begins to falter across a continent where distance is not an inconvenience but a governing reality.

Distance itself becomes an enemy.

Imported food does not provide relief. It simply does not arrive as global supply tightens and other countries begin quietly, then openly, protecting their own populations. Export restrictions appear first as temporary measures, then harden into policy.

Australia is not immune to that logic. It participates in it.

So the system does not collapse in a single dramatic moment. It degrades in layers.

First, the servos become unreliable. Then the shelves become inconsistent. Then the prices become prohibitive.

Abundance does not disappear. It thins. Variety goes first. Then affordability. Then trust. And once trust goes, everything accelerates.

People do not shop for what they need. They shop for what they fear they will not be able to get tomorrow. Businesses hold inventory rather than sell it. Governments intervene with price controls here, export restrictions there, usually just enough to distort signals without restoring stability.

Everyone begins acting as if scarcity is inevitable. That’s how it becomes so, even before the physical logistics make it so.

The modern world did not solve food security. It outsourced it to energy and logistics, then built a culture that forgot the dependency. No supply lines, no abundance.

For a long time, those supply lines were so stable they became invisible. Supermarkets looked like systems of production rather than systems of distribution. It felt as though food simply existed.

But it does not simply exist. It has to be moved.

And if the movement stops, if gas fields burn, if LNG trains go offline, if oil does not come in or go out, then what Australia faces is famine.

Not a theatrical collapse on day one, but a fast-moving unravelling.

Shelves empty, then stay empty. Distribution breaks, then cannot be restored. Production falls, then fails to recover. A country with food somewhere, but not where people are.

Since World War II, politicians have been able to manage crises rhetorically. They rely on spin and process. They will believe that it will work again, just as it always has.

Until it doesn’t.

Petrolmageddon, coming soon to a bowser near you.

Normies don’t really pay close attention to news developments. That’s wise, really. Most of the time, they’re a waste of time.

But sometimes they’re not. And when they’re not, it’s really handy to be the one who panics first.

Along with ballistic missiles hitting Israeli cities, oil tankers getting bombed in the Persian Gulf, missiles raining down on Dubai and Abu Dhabi, Iran getting pummelled, and Middle Eastern oil looking like it’s about to go permanently offline, becoming apocalyptic is not entirely unreasonable.

For Christians, though, ‘apocalypse’ doesn’t just mean the destruction of the world. There’s much more to it.

The Greek word from which we get ‘apocalypse’ actually means ‘revelation’. Hence, the name of the final book in the Bible. It’s the content of the Book of Revelation, trumpets being blasted, seas turning to blood, Hell being opened, Whores getting burned, that kind of thing, that has given us our meaning of apocalypse.

I have to confess, and it might not surprise you to read this, that I’m kind of looking out for the apocalypse maybe soon, too. But it’s not because of the sudden outbreak of a very dangerous war in the Middle East. That’s secondary. There have always been wars and rumours of wars.

I’ve got other reasons, and given that it’s March 18, 2026 today, I thought I’d go through one of them with you.

Today is New Year’s Day. Or at least it was for the group of people who wrote and stored the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Scholars are pretty confident that they were Essenes, and it’s my view that this group was a community of people on the lookout for the messiah who got absorbed into the Jesus movement and became the foundations of the early church in Palestine.

A scholar who has spent decades investigating how these people understood time is Dr Ken Johnson, and he wrote a book about the Essenian calendar and how it points to the timing of prophetic events.

Ken Johnson’s work is not especially well known, but it is unusually specific. He argues that, unlike the more familiar lunar calendar used in mainstream Judaism to this day, the Essenes appear to have followed a solar calendar structured around fixed cycles. Johnson’s claim is that this calendar preserves a Jubilee framework that is not merely symbolic but chronological.

They are fifty-year cycles of ordered time.

Within that framework, he places what he calls the “final Jubilee” of the last age1 between roughly 26 AD and 76 AD. The dating is not arbitrary. It begins around the start of Christ’s ministry and ends with the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in 70 AD, with a few years on either side to complete the cycle.

The claim is not just that important things happened in that period. It is that the period itself was structured to contain them.

All the big events that Daniel and the other Prophets had proclaimed about Israel came to pass within that time window.

If you accept that premise, even tentatively, then the implication is difficult to ignore. Jubilee cycles do not simply stop. They roll forward. And if one such cycle marked the end of an age centred on Israel, then a corresponding cycle could mark the close of a broader age.

Not a local ending this time, because God has not been dealing with humanity through one people during this age. This time, the events foretold in the New Testament’s version of Daniel, Revelation, will affect the entire world.

And today, March 18 2026, is the first day of the final Jubilee year according to the Essenian calendar.

Happy New Year !

You may, however, not be a believer in such Bible nonsense. That’s fine. The cyclical view of time held by ancient people, however, is something that I still believe we can learn from and gain wisdom by.

They understood that time is cyclical in ways that we intuit but can’t explain. Certain pressures recur. Certain alignments return.

We are living through a time that in many ways echoes the 1970s. The Bretton Woods monetary system broke apart, and dollar hegemony was challenged. Oil shocks disrupted industrial economies. Inflation unsettled politics and destabilised governments. Remember the Whitlam Dismissal? The US seemed overextended and on the wane.

The same cluster of pressures is visible again. Energy insecurity. Questions around dollar dominance. Regional conflicts that sit uncomfortably close to critical supply routes. None of these, taken alone, is unprecedented. Together, they begin to form a pattern that is harder to dismiss.

What we are seeing is not simply a crisis. It is the reappearance of a particular kind of moment.

These are the types of insights that are often best captured in literature, and the novel I’ve found myself reflecting on recently is Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Heart of Darkness is often read as a critique of colonial brutality, which it is. But structurally, it is about something more precise. It traces the movement from order into ambiguity. The further Marlow travels from the administrative centre, the less coherent the imperial project becomes. By the time he reaches Kurtz, authority has detached from any recognisable moral framework.

The horror is not just what Kurtz does. It is that he has become the chaos he was sent to tame.

Apocalypse Now! lifts that structure almost intact and places it in the context of the Vietnam War. The river journey remains. The gradual breakdown of command remains. Instead of Africa, we see Southeast Asia.

A mission continues because it has begun. Each layer of authority is thinner than the last. By the time Captain Willard reaches Kurtz, the war has ceased to have a clear objective. It persists out of inertia.

With Trump, we are seeing the Heart of Darkness play out in the Middle East. Destruction for the sake of destruction. Out of the imperial project to impose order emerges chaos, horror, and despair. Imperial overreach bringing darkness, atrocity, and ultimately destruction on the empire itself.

The revelation for Marlow and for his film adaptation Captain Willard is that the darkness is not external. It was internal all along.

The revelation of celestial reality at the end of the Bible does bring God’s destruction down on the corrupt world system at the end of this age. It is Yahweh on the storm clouds, bringing divine retribution and the administration of catastrophic judgement.

The Essenes seemed to get it right about the apocalypse of Israel at the end of the last age. The Jews had been warned. They suffered terrible destruction in Jerusalem for what they’d done to the messiah.

We’ve been warned, too. Nothing lasts forever.

The storm is coming.

It is the sort of thing that we wouldn’t have thought of as an event a decade ago. Load the car, fill the tank, drive a few hours down the motorway, spend the day quoting Cobra Kai one-liners, head home again.

But along the way, something unsettling hit me.

This was beginning to feel already like a bit of a luxury thing to do.

The petrol alone made that clear. What once felt like a routine weekend outing now carries the faint sense of indulgence. A long drive for a hobby. A casual trip between cities. The assumption that fuel will always be cheap enough, abundant enough, and available enough to make such things ordinary.

For most of our lives, we have taken that assumption for granted. Petroleum and its derivatives are the blood of modern civilisation. We take it for granted that its circulation will always supply our needs.

But civilisation is held together by logistics that most people never see.

The supermarket shelves appear full as if by magic. Aircraft cross continents overnight. Container ships arrive in Australian ports stacked high with goods from every corner of the planet. Petrol stations glow under bright lights along the motorway, dispensing energy with the casual ease of a vending machine.

Behind that apparent simplicity lies an enormous machinery of pipelines, tankers, refineries, ports, shipping insurance markets, naval patrols, and financial clearing systems.

Modern life rests on that machinery, and the heart of that machinery is being exploded as you read this.

It’s a civilisational heart attack, and we get a front row seat to live through it.

The Strait of Hormuz is one of the narrowest and most important arteries in the global economy. Roughly a fifth of the world’s traded oil passes through that thin stretch of water between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula. Tankers leaving the Persian Gulf must navigate a corridor only a few dozen miles wide before entering the wider Indian Ocean.

It’s the narrowest artery in the most vital area of the global circulatory system. Now Iran is blocking it off.

By attacking the oil infrastructure of the Gulf Cooperation Council states and effectively shutting down traffic through Hormuz, Tehran has not merely launched a regional military operation. It has struck directly at the logistical foundation of the modern economic system.

Oil is often described as fuel for cars. That description is convenient but misleading.

Oil is far more than a transportation fuel. It is the industrial blood of modern civilisation.

Petrochemicals form the basis of plastics, synthetic fibres, pharmaceuticals, bitumen, and countless industrial materials. Aviation depends on refined petroleum products. Global shipping runs on bunker fuel. Fertiliser production relies heavily on hydrocarbons. Manufacturing, construction, and modern agriculture all draw deeply from the same energy well.

The plastic case on your phone. The insulation on electrical wires. The paint on your walls. The foam in your mattress. The polyester in your clothes. The tyres on your car. The paint on your car. The seats in your car. The dashboard in your car. The bitumen under your car.

The syringes in hospitals. The packaging around sterile equipment. The fertilisers that grow modern crops. The pesticides that protect them. The shampoo in your shower. The nylon in sportswear. The resins in wind turbine blades. All of these things begin in petrochemical plants.

We do not merely burn oil. We build our civilisation out of it. Remove oil from the system, and the consequences extend far beyond the price of petrol.

Industrial societies function because they possess vast reservoirs of concentrated energy. Oil provides that energy in a form that is dense, portable, and easily stored. It is the quiet enabler of almost everything that makes modern life possible.

But energy alone is not the whole story.

The global oil market is also the hidden pillar of the international financial system.

Since the collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary order in the early 1970s, the United States has effectively anchored the world economy around the pricing of oil in US dollars. Nations require dollars to purchase energy, and therefore hold dollar reserves. Those reserves flow back into American financial markets, reinforcing the dollar’s position as the central currency of global trade.

Energy and finance thus became intertwined.

Oil stabilised the dollar. The dollar stabilised the trading system.

The result was a monetary architecture that supported the enormous expansion of globalisation over the past half-century. Supply chains stretched across continents. Manufacturing dispersed across oceans. Consumer societies in the West imported goods from everywhere while exporting the currency used to purchase them.

Yet this entire arrangement rests on something older that I wrote about in 2024: control of the sea lanes.

For roughly five hundred years, the global trading system has been underwritten by Western naval power. The Portuguese opened the ocean routes in the fifteenth century. The Dutch and the British turned those routes into commercial highways. In the twentieth century, the United States Navy inherited the task of keeping the oceans open.

Global capitalism was never simply a matter of markets and finance. It was also a matter of security.

Merchants will ship goods across oceans only if they believe those goods will arrive safely. That belief depends on naval patrols, international law, and an intricate web of maritime insurance markets centred historically in London.

Trade, in other words, requires both protection and trust. For centuries, the Western maritime powers provided both.

The Persian Gulf oil trade is one of the most important pieces of that structure. Tankers move through Hormuz under the assumption that the sea lanes will remain open and insurable. Shipping firms calculate risk accordingly. Insurance companies price policies based on the expectation that major naval powers will prevent sustained disruption.

But those assumptions begin to unravel the moment a chokepoint becomes a battlefield.

Insurance premiums spike. Shipping companies hesitate. Naval escorts become necessary. Even if tankers can technically pass through the strait, the cost of doing so may become prohibitive.

The system has a myocardial infarction.

Since World War II at least, the Western world has lived inside the illusion that global integration is permanent. Goods flow effortlessly across oceans. Supply chains stretch thousands of kilometres without serious interruption. Distance itself seems to have been conquered.

Cheap energy and secure sea lanes created that illusion.

Yet history offers a more sobering perspective. Large trade networks have collapsed before. The Bronze Age trading system disintegrated around 1200 BC. The Roman Mediterranean fractured in late antiquity. The Silk Road periodically vanished for centuries when political and military conditions made long-distance commerce too dangerous.

Arrogant neocon think tank intellectuals in America told us we had reached the End of History in the 1990s with the fall of the Soviet Union. The ‘mad mullahs’ say otherwise, and are now bringing history back with a Shahed drone bang.

Iran’s attacks on Gulf oil infrastructure and its effective closure of Hormuz represent more than a regional escalation. They mark a signal event in the slow unravelling of the economic order that has shaped the modern world.

The consequences will not appear overnight. Civilisational systems rarely collapse in a single dramatic moment. Instead, they begin to strain. Prices rise. Supply chains falter. Governments scramble to stabilise markets that were once taken for granted.

Gradually, the underlying assumptions of everyday life begin to change.

A long drive to Sydney becomes something you think about before filling the tank.

For the past half century, the industrial world has lived within a system built on cheap energy, secure sea lanes, and a financial architecture tied closely to the global oil trade. That system produced extraordinary prosperity, but it also created an illusion of permanence.

Now the foundations are beginning to crack.

Modern civilisation likes to imagine that its problems are primarily political or technological. Yet the deeper structures of history are often logistical. Empires rise when they master the movement of energy and goods across distance. They falter when those flows become uncertain.

The tankers burning in the Persian Gulf are therefore more than images of regional conflict.

They’re a planetary blood clot blocking the most important coronal artery of our civilisation.

People complain over dinner about petrol prices. More politically engaged individuals might grumble to others about government policies. The most animated will post online or even create online content to spread their disgruntlement.

Most of the time, ordinary dissent remains moderate because ordinary people are moderate. People have jobs, families, reputations. Particularly older people. They have things to lose.

The young are usually more radical because they have less to lose and more to gain by improving their future status.

But when dissent becomes a profound moral challenge to the established social order and groups begin to organise, the elites in charge notice. Mechanisms are activated to redirect, offset, and, if necessary, crush organised resistance.

The online rageposter tones it down after losing their Facebook account, although their views don’t change. Their anger doesn’t go away. Those with more to lose, reputation, status, livelihoods, relationships, go quiet.

There’s a type of person, however, who doesn’t comply. They harden. They organise. They develop consensus views with others like them and they dedicate their life to overthrowing the unjust regime they despise.

These are the radicals. A wave of these types arose in the post-68 student movements in the West, and they were ultimately mollified by being given academic positions with tenure, high status, and access to molestable students. Their neo-Marxist ideology was eventually absorbed by the system and became the woke hegemony we see throughout Western societies today.

The radicals of yesterday become the elites of today. If the hardened radicals cannot be accommodated by bribery and institutionalisation, however, then the system has a problem. History is clear.

There’s going to be a revolution.

The Shah’s Mistake

In the 1960s and 70s, Iran under the Shah looked to outsiders like a modernising state.

Universities were expanding. Oil money was pouring in. Western observers imagined that if the regime ever collapsed, the successor would likely be some version of liberal nationalism.

That assumption rested on a quiet belief that the political opposition looked roughly like the population. But repression had already changed the composition of dissent.

The Shah’s security apparatus, SAVAK, spent decades arresting and torturing dissidents, dismantling political parties, and suppressing reform movements.

The regime believed it was eliminating opposition. What it was actually doing was decanting the timidity and reasonableness out of it.

Liberal reformers had careers. Students had futures. Technocrats had reputations. They could be intimidated.

Clerics were harder to intimidate, particularly in the rural areas. One of them in particular was a preacher named Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Khomeini was not originally a towering national figure. He was a provincial religious scholar who spent much of his political career in exile.

His advantage was something simple. He had a network the state could not fully dismantle.

Religious teachers were usually not political in Persia, but they had enormous cultural power via mosques, religious schools, and clerical relationships that stretched across the country.

Alongside this institutional power came the new technology of cassette tapes.

Khomeini’s sermons were recorded abroad, duplicated endlessly, and smuggled into Iran. They circulated through mosques and bazaars, played quietly in homes and religious gatherings.

It was the pre-internet version of viral media. While secular opposition groups were infiltrated and dismantled, this religious communication network continued to spread a message that was uncompromising, theological, and revolutionary.

By the late 1970s, many moderate opponents of the regime had already been neutralised. The clerical movement remained.

So when the Shah’s state finally cracked under economic crisis and mass protests, the outcome surprised Western observers. But it should not have.

The Shah had eliminated opposition from established alternatives. Clerics had not held political positions in Shia Islam until that point.

The Ayatollah changed that, and thereby changed world history. By fusing religious fundamentalism with revolutionary political zeal, the new clerical elite in Iran proved yet again that liberalism’s great weakness is that it cannot understand a man who cannot be bribed.

It does not understand and cannot accommodate the true extremist.

Weimar’s Disappearing Middle

The late Weimar Republic offers a political version of the same dynamic.

Germany in the 1920s was a debauched, dispirited place. A plethora of political parties contended for power. Cultural norms had collapsed. Cynicism and nihilism were rampant.

The credible threat of a communist revolution led to a hardening of reactionary forces, particularly among returned World War I veterans who were sickened at what Germany was becoming.

As instability grew, the state increasingly tried to control extremism through bans, arrests, and emergency powers. Hitler himself attended the first meeting of what became the NSDAP as a spy for the army, before joining up that night.

In the post-WWI crisis of German society, the centre gave way, aided by the repressive Weimar government. Moderates disappeared, and gradually German politics collapsed into two poles.

By 1932, the streets of Berlin were dominated by the communist Antifaschistische Aktion (Antifa) and the NSDAP's Sturmabteilung (SA).

Kind of like Melbourne today, really.

Luther’s revolution

The same process occurred via the Protestant Reformation. The Catholic Church had accommodated the reformatio movement for centuries, but letting the peasants read the Bible in their local language was a bridge too far. It was something the medieval church could not accommodate. It struck at the base of their power structure.

They burned heretic after heretic until finally Martin Luther, with the support of German elites wanting to break into the Jewish-controlled banking game, led the revolution that established the Protestant churches.

Martin Luther was a fanatic. That’s why he won.

The revolution of the saints

Ironically, of course, the Catholic Church itself was the heir to just such a process.

The Romans were famously lax when it came to the religion and cultural practices of those they governed. Just pay your taxes and do what you like, was the vibe. The new Jewish religious movement that came to be called the Christians, however, found the one pillar of Roman power that the Roman emperors could not budge on.

Christians refused to participate in the civic religion of Rome. Religion was a public duty in Rome and was believed to hold the state together and appease the gods. As growing numbers of lower-class people in particular converted, the Roman elite saw the threat. They could not accommodate this new morality that sought to undermine the foundations of their power.

The persecutions of the church were intended to wipe it out, of course, but instead they purified the faith. The lukewarm fell away. Only the most fanatical remained, and the willingness of the fanatics to face martyrdom, alongside their moral superiority to the decadent pagan Romans, ensured the victory of the faith.

The Evolutionary Law of Revolutions

All ruling structures become decadent, corrupt, and inward-looking over time. It’s the universal law of entropy that drives history forward. Individuals will emerge who develop critiques of the structure. Those people will influence others, groups will form, resistance will organise, and power will be challenged.

The repressive reaction of the ruling structures provides evolutionary pressure for the rebellion. Like resistance training, the pressure of censorship, persecution, and martyrdom refines the membership of the dissidents and solidifies their identity as revolutionaries.

The martyrs of one generation become the leaders of the next. It can take a long time. For Christianity, it took centuries. Yet the evolutionary law of revolutions holds fast.

Iran is playing this role on the global stage among nations. Twelver Shia Islam as developed by the ayatollahs, fused with anti-Zionism and eschatological zeal, is a critique not only of liberalism but of modernity itself. It is a more profound challenge to the Western liberal world order than even communism was. The communists were still materialists. They weren’t going to martyr themselves.

The US-Israeli attack on Iran has now hardened the ideology of the ayatollahs and no doubt galvanised their supporters. The evolutionary pressure is now in overdrive.

Dissent, populism, and religious zeal are emerging in various forms around the world. Decadent, Zionist, liberal imperialism is doubling down on the repression.

Liberalism itself was once a radical ideology opposed to aristocratic privilege. Now it’s the power structure. It is the ‘sensible centre’.

It’s become what the Catholic Church was in northern Europe by the 16th century.

It’s not the future. The future is tomorrow.

And tomorrow, as always, belongs to the radical.

We’re so used to seeing public displays of Christianity from American politicians that it doesn’t really register. Most journalists probably thought it was a publicity stunt to shore up the evangelical base.

But there’s a more profound and disturbing element to this. We cannot know what Trump does or doesn’t believe, but the millions of Americans he’s doing this in front of do not see it as just political theatre.

Millions of Americans actually believe this stuff. You might not. I don’t. But that doesn’t matter.

The Zionist base that Trump relies on does, and that makes the strategic calculation of what’s happening in the Middle East very different.

Rational actors try to avoid catastrophe. Apocalyptic actors try to make it happen.

Modern geopolitical analysis has a blind spot the size of heaven.

Religion is treated as background noise. Identity politics. Cultural decoration. Something leaders say to voters and quietly ignore when the serious decisions begin.

It’s always been this way. Elite Roman senators wrote letters to each other about how the gods were a silly idea but religion was useful to rule the dumb plebs.

But elite cynicism is not what drives history. Mass belief is.

The Crusades were not symbolic.
The Taiping Rebellion killed tens of millions.
The Mahdist wars in Sudan were not a metaphor.

When people believe God is about to intervene in history, their tolerance for chaos changes.

The university big-brains who run societies think every other decision-maker in the world is also following national self-interest. The people making decisions about the Middle East right now, however, are not following rational self-interest.

They’re following the Book of Revelation or Ezekiel 28:2-3 or Surah Al-Kahf 18:94. It’s not an opportunistic photo shoot for them. For them, it’s real.

Shia Islam: the Mahdi

In Shia Islam, the end of history arrives with the return of the Hidden Imam, also known as the Mahdi.

If you’re not familiar with it, read the Quran. Or save yourself and read Dune instead.

According to Twelver Shia belief, the twelfth Imam did not die. He disappeared. He remains alive in occultation and will re-emerge at the end of time to destroy injustice and establish divine rule.

Kinda like Elvis but more cataclysmic.

Before the return of the Mahdi, however, the world descends into chaos. War spreads. Tyranny rises. Order collapses. Then the Mahdi appears.

Does it seem to you like Iran is doing everything it can to blow the world system up?

That’s because this belief sits at the theological centre of Iranian Shia Islam and has shaped the ideological vocabulary of the Islamic Republic since the revolution.

Just like a prepper will carry on with things while stacking Mylar bags of rice and heirloom seeds in the evening, the Iranian government has been stacking drones and missiles. Because it was not a question of if, but when.

Jewish Zionism: the War of Gog and Magog

Jewish tradition contains its own final war. The rabbis call it the battle of Gog and Magog.

In the prophetic interpretations of the rabbis, the nations gather against Israel in a vast final assault at the end of the current age. A coalition surrounds Jerusalem. The Jewish people stand on the edge of destruction.

Then God intervenes. Or ‘G-d’. The invaders collapse. The enemies of Israel are destroyed. The messianic age begins.

Secular Israelis in the hipster suburbs of Tel Aviv think this is silly. The more numerous conservative religious Israelis believe that this war is now at hand.

The rising antipathy toward Israel and thereby Jews around the world is evidence for them that this date with destiny is at hand.

This war is not a strategic sign. It is a metaphysical sign. The Olam HaBa when the world ruled will be ruled from Jerusalem is nigh.

Christian Zionism: the world vs Israel

Then there is Washington.

American evangelical Protestantism contains one of the most politically powerful apocalyptic traditions in the modern world.

For millions of believers, the modern state of Israel is not merely a geopolitical ally. It is a prophetic event.

The Christian Zionist and Jewish Zionist eschatological beliefs are mirror images up to the question of the messiah. For Christian Zionists, it’s the rapture and the return of Jesus. For Jewish Zionists, two messianic figures emerge to bring about the redemption of the Jews.

Dispensational theology is the name given to the scriptural interpretation that underpins Christian Zionism. It’s a famously complex topic and is enormously influential in evangelical churches.

For Christian Zionists, the Middle East is not just another region. It is the setting for the end of this world and the birth of the new.

Therefore, for millions of American evangelicals, Israel is not merely an ally.
It is a prophetic trigger.

That belief sits behind American political language about Israel. If you don’t know the backstory, the way American Christians relate to Israel seems bizarre and puzzling.

If you’re Australia, it can feel a bit like being the chaperone on a date.

It’s not puzzling if you’re a Dispensationalist.

The war to end the world

The overlap between all these eschatological visions is the destruction of the world order via a cataclysmic war.

How a war could devastate the entire world was probably quite puzzling until the twentieth century. Now we know. Nukes are seen as eschatological tools by the diehard religionists pushing us to Armageddon.

The Book of Revelation did not include missile silos. Although these prophecies are ancient, the weapons this war will necessitate are modern.

While not every participant in this götterdämmerung of the eschatologies actively wants nuclear war, they all share the belief that it is inevitable, necessary, and redemptive.

Decision-makers in America, Israel, and Iran all believe the final war is coming. Not all of them, but at this moment in our political history, it’s the ones who can push the red buttons.

Human beings have believed the end of the world was near for thousands of years. For most of that time, we lacked the means to make it happen.

That technical problem was solved in 1945. Since then, it hasn’t been a matter of if, really.

Just when.

They think about the price. At least these days they do.

I usually get bored before the tank is full and only fill it three-quarters. Drives my wife nuts.

All of us, however, are being reminded of just how relevant the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf overall are to our way of life. What was once a sandy piece of nowhere controlled by barbaric sand people is now a sandy stretch of the most geopolitically sensitive, oil-rich strip of land, still controlled by barbaric sand people.

Those barbaric sand people, however, have a lot of military equipment, and a religious vision to blow it all up so that their fake version of Jesus will come back or something.

As I recently explained to the wife and kids, the Persian Gulf is the cajones of modernity.

The global economy, when viewed from glittery shopping centres or hipster holiday locations, looks sprawling and indestructible. Supply chains cross oceans. Energy markets operate across continents. The system is planetary in scale and so seems indestructible.

But geography has a wicked sense of humour. Complex civilisations rely upon one or two key commodities to function, and geography loves to put those commodities in really difficult-to-hold locations.

Civilisations grow outward, connecting distant resources to crowded centres of power. Food moves from fertile regions to cities. Metal travels from mines to workshops. Energy flows from remote fields to industrial economies. Over time, those movements become organised into routes, and those routes often pass through narrow corridors that cannot easily be replaced.

The larger the system becomes, the more it depends on these passages.

History is full of them.

Imperial Rome was able to feed itself thanks to Egypt. It’s why Julius Caesar and Mark Antony both focused on the place. It wasn’t Cleopatra’s saucy charms that took them there. It was grain.

After Augustus annexed the province in 30 BC, Egypt became the most important supplier of grain to the capital. Each year, fleets of merchant ships sailed from Alexandria across the Mediterranean toward Ostia, the harbour that served Rome. Their cargo sustained the annona, the system that distributed grain to hundreds of thousands of citizens.

The Nile provided a predictable annual harvest that became the mainstay of the Roman system of bread and circuses.

The arrangement made logistical sense. Egypt was fertile, productive, and connected to the sea through the Nile. But it also created a peculiar vulnerability. Rome had grown into a city of extraordinary size, perhaps two million inhabitants. A population like that cannot easily feed itself from nearby fields.

If the grain fleets were delayed, the consequences were immediate. Ancient writers describe episodes of unrest when shortages appeared. Bread is political, and the Romans knew it.

Control of Egypt therefore carried strategic weight. During the turbulent Year of the Four Emperors in AD 69, Vespasian strengthened his position by securing Egypt and its grain supply. Whoever held the province possessed a quiet lever over the capital.

Rome’s legions dominated the Mediterranean world. Yet the stability of the city rested on ships sailing from one province.

Empires expand by conquering territory, however they endure by organising supply.

Early modern Spain depended on a different cargo.

Beginning in the sixteenth century enormous quantities of silver flowed from the Americas to Europe. The mines of Potosí in the Andes and the great mining regions of Mexico produced a stream of bullion that financed Spain’s imperial ambitions.

Transporting that wealth required careful organisation. The Spanish crown developed the treasure fleet system, heavily escorted convoys that carried silver across the Atlantic. These voyages linked American mines to European wars.

The system worked remarkably well for long stretches of time. But the dependence it created was unmistakable. Storms could scatter ships. Privateers could capture them. Delays could ripple through imperial finances.

Spain remained the most powerful monarchy in Europe for much of the sixteenth century, yet its treasury waited each year for the arrival of convoys from the New World. Even with rivers of silver flowing inward, the Spanish crown declared bankruptcy several times as war expenses outran the timing of shipments.

When the rivers of gold and silver ceased, so did the glory of Hapsburg Spain.

The relationship between trade routes and power also shaped the history of Han China.

The Silk Road was not a single road but a network of routes connecting China to Central Asia. Through these routes flowed silk, horses, precious goods, and diplomatic exchanges. Control of the western approaches therefore mattered greatly to the Han state.

One geographic feature was particularly important. The Hexi Corridor, a narrow band of territory that connects the Chinese heartland to the deserts and steppe beyond, was the chokepoint for the commodities and luxuries that flowed back and forth to sustain the Han Chinese golden age.

Han emperors invested heavily in securing the region. Garrisons were established, campaigns were launched, and alliances were negotiated with Central Asian peoples. Trade and security moved together.

When the Han dynasty weakened in the second and third centuries, authority over these frontier regions eroded. Caravans became more difficult to protect. The great trading networks that once linked China to distant markets grew less stable.

As the Chinese lost control of the corridor, their standard of living and geopolitical weight diminished. It is only today, with the development of the Belt and Road Initiative, that the Chinese look to be about to regain their geopolitical position.

Across these very different societies a common pattern appears.

Rome depended on grain fleets sailing from Egypt.

Spain depended on silver convoys crossing the Atlantic.

Han China depended on corridors that connected it to the Silk Road.

The details vary but the pattern is the same.

Civilisations grow by linking distant resources to concentrated centres of power. This requires dominating the locals in the regions that strategic commodities are sourced from. This drains the empire’s strength over time.

The modern world runs on oil to an extent that few of us were aware of until now.

The Strait of Hormuz is the chokepoint. The Persian Gulf is where the cheapest, most easily available oil is sourced from, and it has to pass through the Strait to get to refineries and industrial systems mostly in Asia. Billions of people depend upon the economic activity that oil enables.

The Roman grain fleets fed a single city. The silver fleets financed a single empire. Tankers passing through Hormuz sustain industrial economies across the entire planet.

The system looks enormous, but the Iranians are able to take it out by squeezing it at its most vulnerable point.

And they’re squeezing those cajones hard.

Not tidying them. Washing them.

Water had to be hauled and heated. Shirts were scrubbed against boards until the fabric surrendered its dirt. Each garment had to be wrung by hand, the water twisted out through sheer effort, and then carried outside and hung to dry.

It was ordinary work. No one thought of it as exercise. But it was exercise.

What appears mundane to us required hours of sustained physical effort. The entire rhythm of daily life demanded movement, lifting, carrying, scrubbing, walking. Bodies were not trained in gyms because they were trained by life itself.

Then the machines arrived.

The Industrial Revolution did more than reorganise production. It quietly reorganised the human body.

Tasks that once demanded strength were mechanised. Transport replaced walking. Household appliances removed the physical demands of domestic labour. The washing machine alone erased one of the most exhausting recurring tasks in ordinary life.

Convenience accumulated, and with it came a subtle shift in the baseline expectations of the human body.

One striking indicator is grip strength. Physiologists often use it as a simple proxy for overall physical robustness. Across multiple studies, male grip strength has declined noticeably since the nineteenth century. The human body, it turns out, adapts to the environment it inhabits.

Remove the need for effort, and the capacity for effort begins to fade.

The body is efficient in this way. It keeps what it needs, and discards what it does not.

This pattern, however, is not new.

The ancient Mediterranean world experienced a softer version of the same transition. As cities expanded and wealthy households relied increasingly on enslaved labour, the elites of Greece and later Rome found themselves strangely removed from the physical demands that had once defined ordinary life.

Agrarian societies produce strong bodies almost by accident. Urban wealth, by contrast, tends to outsource labour.

The response was cultural rather than technological.

The Greeks developed the institution of the gymnasium, a place where citizens deliberately trained the body through exercise, wrestling, and athletics. The Romans later embedded similar practices within the social life of the baths.

What had once been unavoidable labour became structured activity, and exercise became a scheduled activity useful for networking purposes.

The pattern is evident in both the ancient and modern examples. When labour disappears from ordinary life, societies invent artificial substitutes to push back against entropy.

Modern gyms operate on precisely the same logic.

The treadmill simulates walking. The rowing machine simulates rowing. Weight machines replicate the lifting that once occurred in farms, docks, workshops, and building sites.

We have built elaborate rooms full of machines designed to imitate the physical work machines eliminated. Exercise is no longer something that simply happens. It is something we book between meetings.

The irony is difficult to miss. We solved the problem of toilsome physical labour and now we work soul-destroying jobs to earn debt credits to buy back the opportunity to do toilsome physical labour.

Behind this pattern lies a simple rule about human abilities. They persist when they are required, they decay when they are no longer required.

We see the same dynamic in smaller things. The arrival of digital storage weakened the everyday habit of memorisation. Navigation skills decline when every journey is guided by GPS. Mechanical knowledge fades in societies where devices arrive sealed, specialised, and impossible to repair.

The human mind is remarkably adaptable. It conserves effort wherever possible.

Which brings us to a new and more subtle substitution.

Our great-grandfathers built the houses their children grew up in. Most postmodern bugmen can barely assemble a flatpack.

Ancient thinkers occasionally worried about this sort of development. When writing began to spread across the Greek world, some suspected it might weaken the mind.

In the dialogue Phaedrus, Plato recounts a story in which the invention of writing is criticised for encouraging people to rely on external symbols rather than on internal memory. Instead of remembering knowledge, they would merely consult it.

He was probably right, although we can’t prove it. Ancient wandering poets memorised entire books to recite to audiences.

While books preserve knowledge across centuries and enable the continuous development of civilisation, they may have done so at the cost of our individual cognitive abilities. Digitisation has supercharged that process.

Whether the digitisation of our civilisational knowledge has made civilisation more fragile is something we’ll have to find out about. The burning of a single library at Alexandria 1500 years ago destroyed enormous amounts of accumulated knowledge. What happens when ballistic missiles take out data centres and the libraries had digitised all the books?

Artificial Intelligence introduces a different kind of substitution. While writing stored thought, AI produces it. Or at least, mimics the simulation of it. Is that still thinking?

Tasks that once required sustained intellectual effort, the drafting of text, summarising research, analysing information, even constructing arguments, can now be automated with remarkable speed.

In the Soviet Union, workers joked that they pretended to work while the bosses pretended to pay them. In the postmodern West, students pretend to write assignments and teachers pretend to mark them.

The machines of the nineteenth century replaced muscle. The machines of the twenty-first are replacing cognition.

As our muscles were replaced, we decayed. We had to invent social practices to compensate, but we’ve never fully gained back the physical fitness we once had.

And now the same technological processes that did that to our bodies have made a quantum leap in doing that to our minds.

Thinking itself will thin. Attention spans are already shortening. We’re drugging kids, especially boys, to make them pay attention. Deep reading is becoming an elite pastime. Our abilities to reason will follow.

It’s like the old shampoo ad. It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen.

It will mean that the human capital required to run complex civilisation, already under threat from demographic shifts, may well become insufficient to keep the lights on. The only strategy at that point would be to hand over control of civilisation itself to AI.

Will high-agency individuals and communities develop habits of intentional cognitive exercise via rigorous reading and arduous study to compensate, or will we slide into idiocracy ruled over by a matrix that we can’t even maintain anymore?

The normies are trying to give their kids an edge by getting them to code. Maybe that’s smart. I’m not sure though that AI won’t be doing the coding.

Maybe they should give their kids books.

Over the past year, I’ve spent a lot of my writing time finishing a book I’ve been working on. Hopefully it’lll be out some time this year. It’s now largely done, which means I’m back to writing here much more regularly.

So I’ve opened a subscriber chat.

The idea is simple: a place where readers can talk about posts, ask questions, share ideas, or raise topics that might be worth exploring in future articles. Some of the most worldview-changing ideas I’ve come across have been from readers.

If you’re a subscriber, come and say hello.

— David

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Australian researchers have used a ‘biological computer’ to outperform a random shooter at the game. This builds upon the 2021 breakthrough in which Cortical Labs used neuron-powered chips to play Pong.

The brain cells also outperformed machine digital systems in processing power per energy unit consumed. The implications for the future of AI are profound.

I suspect we’ll be hearing much more about biological computers, biological robots, and biological drones in the future if the world doesn’t blow up first.

Or as the world blows up. Wars tend to drive technological development.

Given that an artificial intelligence has just managed to use human brain tissue to shoot humans, this might be the time to step back and put what we’re looking at in historical perspective.

This is a history blog, after all. The purpose of this blog is to explore the nature of historical cycles and how they correspond to a Biblical worldview. So let’s take a look at the historical development of artificial intelligence.

The history of non-human intelligences taking over bodies is fascinating, and like all technologies, it started with culture and mythology before science and technology caught up and made it happen.

The culture and mythology that has inspired the development of AI is the tradition of the golem.

The golem belongs to the Jewish intellectual tradition. The word golem appears once in the Hebrew Bible in Psalm 139 when the Psalmist is addressing God: “Your eyes saw my golem.” The term refers to an unformed body that is incomplete. It’s matter not yet shaped into a person.

A golem was understood by the Bible writers as an animated body without the spirit of God breathed into it, shaped by man instead of by God. It’s a being with no soul.

The Talmud is the record of the rabbis' commentaries on what we call the Old Testament. It was formalised in book form after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD and then Judea in the 130s AD, but was no doubt based on oral traditions that extended at least back to the 2nd century BC.

In the Talmud, the word golem becomes more philosophical. The rabbis interpret the golem as what Adam was before the divine spirit animated him (Sanhedrin 38b). Creating the golem becomes connected with being God.

The next stage in the development of the golem occurred between the 3rd and 6th centuries AD. In the Jewish mystical text the Sefer Yetzirah, the view was spread that the universe was created through Hebrew letters and numbers, which have magical creative power.

This is the basis of much gematria and Kabbalah ritual practice to this day. Medieval Jewish commentaries claim that sages could animate clay figures using permutations of the Hebrew alphabet and the ‘divine name’.

By the 13th century, Eleazar of Worms was writing elaborate Kabbalistic rituals on how to form a human body from clay, walking around it reciting Hebrew letters, and inscribing the clay body with divine names. They were taken very seriously by Kabbalists.

From these practices emerged the tradition of the Golem of Prague in the 16th century. Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the Maharal of Prague, created a clay giant from the banks of the Vltava River that protected the local Jewish community against anti-Semitism. This role of the golem becomes central to the legend.

Also central to the account is that the golem eventually turns on the Jewish community itself. It’s a well-known motif among Jewish people.

By the 1800s, the golem legend became a widespread narrative. It went alongside the Industrial Revolution when machinery began to take over work done by humans animals for millennia until then.

Frankenstein was published in 1818. Kabbalist and occultist Gustav Meyrink wrote the novel The Golem in 1915. The silent film The Golem: How He Came into the World was popular in 1920.

It’s become widespread among scholars to see the golem as the earliest narrative about humans creating life through knowledge rather than divine power. From this single Hebrew word in Psalms has grown the imaginary vision for much of the technology we’re seeing transform our lives.

Robots.

Androids.

Artificial intelligence.

The materials change, but the structure of the story stays remarkably consistent.

Human beings create a servant.

The servant becomes capable of acting independently, and the boundary between tool and life becomes uncertain.

This is the origin story of neurons in a lab learning to play Doom. We take it for granted that technology just is. But before technology is discovered, it is imagined.

For Christians, phenomena such as AI are not morally inert. Or at least, they shouldn’t be. God judged the pre-Flood world for angels mixing with humans. Mixing things that shouldn’t be mixed. It’s something that God takes very seriously.

In the Bible, Babel and Babylon are not different words. Babylon is the Greek form of the Hebrew word Babel. Bab-el in Hebrew means ‘gate to the gods’. The Prophet Daniel, who lived in Babylon, was dealing with this culture at Babylon by which mystics and diviners and enchanters would seek revelatory knowledge from the gods to bring power and riches.

By interpreting the dreams of the king and having greater wisdom than them, Daniel was showing them up. It’s why they hated him so much.

It’s what Babylon was all about: Divinatory revelation to gain power. They wanted to build a portal or gateway to the gods, and God judged them for it by dividing humanity into the nations.

I’ve written before to make the case that we are Mystery Babylon today. Now we’ve achieved the ultimate objective of the golem project. AI-empowered robots and drones that will do whatever they are told.

By whomever is telling them.

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That sentence alone would have sounded futuristic twenty years ago. Now it is just another Saturday errand. The dealer told us demand is up, but only slightly. He reckons, and I agree, that next week the penny will drop for the normies that the fuel price shock is pointing to something that is not temporary. Then he’ll be flat out.

Petrol in March 2026 is about to become the toilet paper of March 2020.

While we were signing the paperwork, a television in the showroom was running Al Jazeera. The volume was low but the captions rolled steadily across the bottom of the screen. It was all about Iran blowing up oil infrastructure.

Until 1971, global currencies were tied, at least nominally, to something real. Gold, silver, other metals. Cowrie shells in ancient China. Physical anchors that restrained governments from simply conjuring wealth from paper, and now digital, promises.

When the United States closed the gold window in 1971, that anchor disappeared. The dollar was no longer convertible into gold. The inflation and oil shock of the 1970s was the result. But the system didn’t collapse. At least not immediately.

The American military became the backstop for the system.

Not formally, of course. No treaty declared it. But the structure of the system made the reality obvious. If you wanted access to the global financial system, you used dollars. And if you used dollars, you participated, willingly or not, in the American order.

The primary role of the American military became securing the one commodity that everything in the modern industrial system needed.

Oil.

For decades the United States Navy ensured that oil moved through sea lanes, chokepoints, and politically unstable regions that nevertheless continued exporting fuel into the global machine. The arrangement was rarely spoken about directly, but its logic was simple. No oil, no modern economy.

Oil did more than power engines. It powered the monetary order itself.

Cheap energy allowed the industrial expansion that made large-scale debt possible. Governments borrowed against future growth. Corporations borrowed against future production. Households borrowed against future wages. Debt only works if tomorrow’s economy is bigger than today’s.

The result was the greatest expansion of financial abstraction in human history. Wealth gradually detached from physical reality and floated upward into balance sheets and financial instruments.

The system rewarded those closest to the creation of money. Elites accumulated assets while the rest of us accumulated liabilities. Debt became the operating system of modern civilisation.

Then something stranger happened.

The abstraction spread beyond finance into daily life itself. Everything became monetised.

Homes were no longer simply homes. They became yield-generating short-term rentals. Cars were no longer owned but leased through lending arrangements that ensure we never quite possess them. Labour ceased to be stable employment and became gigs mediated by apps.

Debt money colonised every aspect of our lives.

Homes became short-term rental earners. Cars became tax instruments we leased. Our daughters’ bodies became commodities on OnlyFans.

Everything could be yours if you had money. If you didn’t have money, you worked to fund the lifestyles of those who did. It was the monetisation of everything. A civilisation organised around extraction.

And the basis of that extraction is the extraction of oil. It is the single point of failure for modern civilisation, and Iran just put a ballistic missile onto it.

If these attacks continue, the consequences will unfold with a brutal mechanical logic.

Oil production cannot simply be turned on and off like a household tap. It is a continuous industrial process dependent on pipelines, refineries, tankers, ports, and storage facilities all functioning simultaneously. Destroy enough of that infrastructure and the system jams.

Pipelines fill. Storage tanks reach capacity. Tankers cannot unload. Once storage runs out, wells must be shut down.

Shutting down oil wells is not trivial. Pressure changes can damage reservoirs permanently, equipment corrodes quickly, and some fields never restart properly. Entire oil basins can effectively die from prolonged disruption.

When oil production collapses, everything else follows because oil is not merely a fuel. It is the raw material of modern civilisation.

Plastics, fertilisers, pharmaceuticals, synthetic fabrics, industrial lubricants, electronics manufacturing, packaging, and transport all depend upon petroleum. Remove oil from the system and supply chains fracture almost immediately.

Factories won’t close because they lack labour. They will close because they lack one tiny component manufactured on the other side of the planet. Remove a specialised bearing, a microcontroller, a chemical additive and entire industries stall.

Mining operations halt when replacement parts fail to arrive. Container shipping declines as insurers panic. Air transport contracts sharply as fuel becomes scarce. Construction freezes when heavy machinery cannot be maintained.

Modern industry is not resilient. It is tightly optimised. Optimisation is efficient, but it is also fragile.

No supply lines, no civilisation.

Project the situation forward ten years.

Supermarkets still exist, but their shelves look different. Packaging is simpler and imported foods are rare. Electronics last longer because replacement is difficult. Cars remain on the road far past their intended lifespan.

The smartphone upgrade cycle disappears. Industrial agriculture shrinks as fertiliser production declines. Cities begin quietly contracting as energy-intensive services become expensive luxuries.

The financial architecture of the early twenty-first century fades into memory. Cryptocurrencies vanish. Highly leveraged financial products disappear. Stock markets shrink into something closer to their early twentieth-century form.

And many of the currencies we use today simply cease to exist.

Distance becomes expensive again. Local production becomes necessary again. The globalised consumer civilisation begins to look less like the inevitable future and more like a brief historical experiment.

All this has happened before.

Around 1200 BC the interconnected world of the eastern Mediterranean collapsed. Trade networks stretched from Greece to Egypt to Mesopotamia. Copper came from Cyprus, tin arrived from Central Asia, and grain moved by sea between palace economies that depended upon long-distance logistics.

Then something broke. The climate cycle turned and the structural fragility of the great empires that had ruled for centuries splintered.

The trade networks failed. Cities burned. In some regions writing disappeared for centuries. Historians call this event the Bronze Age Collapse, but the label hides the structural reality.

It was the failure of an interconnected system. When the supply lines stopped, the palaces fell. Social reality had to adjust downward to new logistical realities.

The civilisations of today are recreations of the same state of codependent fragility as the Bronze Age.

Only larger, faster, and far more dependent on energy.

We built a civilisation whose prosperity rests on a handful of fragile global networks, with the most important of them all running through the world’s oil fields.

Place the system’s single point of failure in and around a region dominated by religionists with catastrophic beliefs about the end times, and we won’t have to imagine the outcome.

We’re about to live it.

Napoleon Bonaparte is credited with the adage that an army marches on its stomach.

As with most famous facts of history, it’s probably wrong. It may have been Frederick the Great who said it. Probably every great general throughout history has said it at some point or another.

There are many factors to military success. Bravery and general hardiness matter. Technology matters. Religious and ideological beliefs matter. The last thing you want is your soldiers to start wondering if the gods or God or the mandate of heaven is held by the guys they’re trying to kill rather than by themselves.

All of those things matter. Yet beneath all of them, what has ultimately determined the success or failure of a military campaign has been something far more boring and prosaic.

Logistics. Supply lines. Getting your soldiers and their stuff into the theatre of operations, keeping them supplied, and building out the infrastructure necessary to do so. That’s how you win a war, all other things being equal.

It’s largely why invading armies have so often failed once they’re far away from established supply lines and familiar territory. When the Japanese invaded Korea during the Imjin War of 1592-98, they looked unstoppable. Wherever they went, they dealt carnage and destruction. Yet they failed, because the Koreans were able to leverage their turtle ships to cut off the Japanese supply lines and, with Chinese help, defeat the Japanese at sea.

No supply lines, no conquest. That’s the golden rule of invading people.

The British soldiers stationed in North America in the late 1700s would likely not have considered themselves far from home. They were among their fellow Englishmen, after all. Yet once a local colonial elite had gained enough cohesion to challenge the crown, and Washington, the largest landowner in North America, became the unifying figurehead for a new colonial identity, it was just a matter of time before the newly-minted Americans expelled their British brethren.

It is easy today to forget that the US military grew out of a guerrilla insurgency. The colonists constantly attacked the supply routes and storehouses the British relied upon, and the 5,000 km voyage from Britain to replenish men and equipment meant the empire bled out. Like the Romans in Parthia, Napoleon in Spain, and everyone in Afghanistan, the British discovered that distance itself is the inhuman enemy when the human enemies are guerrillas.

Empires can project extraordinary power. They can move armies across oceans, deploy fleets, and build bases on the far side of the world. Yet the further that power travels from its centre, the more fragile it becomes. Every mile adds friction. Every ship, warehouse, road, and depot becomes another point of failure.

Locals resisting a foreign invader know this automatically. Imperial soldiers, far from home, acting on orders, just end up wanting to get out of there.

Invaders usually win the battles but still end up losing the war. Atrocities expand as the strain grows. Local resistance hardens, especially when you’re the Great Satan.

Morale collapses, political will back home dries up, and the empire retreats. This is the process that has now begun to begin in the Middle East.

No amount of American wonder tech will change that calculus, either. Space Force could teleport into Teheran with reverse-engineered UFOs and detonate a gravity wave and America will still lose this war.

An empire is not just a powerful military. It is a logistical system. America’s power depends on a vast network of bases, satellites, shipping lanes, radar stations, intelligence hubs, and energy infrastructure that stretches across the globe.

None of this infrastructure exists in isolation. Each piece depends on the others. Oil flows through shipping lanes. Ships depend on surveillance. Surveillance depends on satellites and data centres. Military bases depend on fuel, supply aircraft, and secure communications.

It is a web, and Iran has spent the last twenty years studying how to tear holes in it.

Iran does not need to defeat the United States in a conventional war. That would be suicidal. Instead, it has adopted the strategy that weaker powers have used against stronger ones for centuries.

Attack the logistics.

Oil facilities are sabotaged. Shipping lanes are harassed. Pipelines are threatened. Regional bases are struck by drones and missiles. Radar systems are probed. Data networks are infiltrated. Proxy militias attack infrastructure across several countries at once.

Each individual strike looks small.

But that is the point.

The American revolutionaries did not defeat Britain with a single decisive blow. They won by forcing Britain to defend everything, everywhere, all at once. Every convoy needed protection. Every port needed soldiers. Every mile of coastline required surveillance.

The cost multiplied.

Iran’s strategy works the same way. Each disruption forces the United States to deploy more ships, more aircraft, more intelligence resources, and more defensive systems just to maintain the status quo. Especially when the Little Satan is getting pummelled by hypersonics, too.

The logistical burden grows heavier every week.

Trump is all-in. Yet eventually every empire that faces this quagmire quandary will ask the same question: Is this worth it?

This is how decadent, hubristic, indebted empires end. Not with a dramatic battlefield defeat, but with a quiet recognition that the outer territories require more energy than they return.

Britain did not lose America because the colonists were stronger.

Britain lost America because the logistics of empire finally stopped making sense. Now the American empire is about to lose the Middle East, and maybe thereby the world.