r/FreedomofSpeech

Questions surrounding Trump’s alleged desire for the Nuclear Codes in the situation room sparks another LEGO post.

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The official narrative coming out of Washington and Tel Aviv has always been neat and reassuring: the war against Iran is about nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, and the dismantling of a terrorist proxy network. It is a war of necessity, we are told — a preemptive act of self-defence against an apocalyptic regime on the threshold of a bomb. But as the bombs continue to fall across 26 of Iran’s 31 provinces, as Lebanese villages are levelled and Syrian territory is carved up, as the West Bank is quietly annexed piece by piece in the shadow of the world’s distraction, the more honest question demands to be asked: what if the nuclear framing was always the cover story?

What if this war, at its core, is about land?

THE ARCHITECTURE OF GREATER ISRAEL

The “Greater Israel” project is not merely about territorial expansion — it is also about establishing regional control to secure the freedom to conduct military operations with minimal constraint. That framing matters enormously, because it shifts how we read every Israeli military action of the past three years: not as reactive security measures, but as sequential moves in a much longer strategic game.

At the heart of this vision is territorial expansion. For decades, Israel has engaged in the colonisation of Palestinian territory occupied in 1967, which is now perceived as de facto annexed. Israel is now seeking to expand north, east and south. Its territorial ambitions correspond to plans put forward by the World Zionist Organisation in 1919, which include parts of southern Lebanon and Syria, the left bank of the Jordan River, and parts of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

Gaza, of course, has been the most visible front. But Lebanon followed. In Lebanon, Israel seeks to dismantle Hezbollah not only as a military actor but as the backbone of a Shiite-led political order that obstructs Israeli regional dominance. The deeper objective is to fracture Lebanon into a minorities-based system in which Druze, Christians, and other groups are incentivized to seek external protection and economic linkage with Israel. A weak and segmented Lebanon, in this framework, provides strategic depth without the political liability of direct occupation.

In Syria, the project has moved from proxy warfare to territorial assertion. Israel has occupied and colonised Syria’s Golan Heights for nearly 60 years, and in the past two years has sought to grab more Syrian land. Expansion to the north and south of the Golan Heights would enhance access to water resources and strengthen Israel’s strategic positioning overlooking Damascus. Simultaneously, the Druze and Alawite populations represent potential economic and demographic assets at a time when Israel faces a structural shortage of both soldiers and workers. The Syrian periphery offers a pool of labour that can be selectively incorporated under autonomy arrangements or informal annexation.

The West Bank acceleration, largely ignored amid the spectacle of the Iran war, has been the most legally brazen. On 15 February 2026, the Israeli cabinet issued a decision that amounts to annexation under Israeli law, allocating over 244 million NIS for a government mechanism to facilitate land registration in Area C, transferring powers from the civil administration to Israel’s Ministry of Justice. Netanyahu and his far-right partners are exploiting the ongoing diversion of U.S. and international attention to other regional issues — Iran, Lebanon, the Gaza Strip — to advance controversial West Bank moves. With the world’s gaze fixed on the Strait of Hormuz, the erasure of Palestinian land rights continues on bureaucratic autopilot.

And then there is Jordan — rarely discussed, always present. Israel also desires the East Bank of the Jordan River for economic and strategic reasons. Establishing control over it would not only increase access to arable land but also provide greater strategic depth against potential eastern threats, historically associated with Iraq and Iran. Control over this area would also place key regional transit routes under Israeli influence, particularly those linking the Arabian Peninsula to the eastern Mediterranean. US Ambassador Mike Huckabee, a Christian Zionist who has said of expanded Israeli territory “it would be fine if they took it all,” was recently forced to walk back comments that prompted condemnation from over a dozen states, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey.

IRAN AS THE KEYSTONE

Every territorial ambition listed above shares a common prerequisite: a broken Iran. Iran has been the financial spine, the military supplier, and the ideological anchor of the entire “Axis of Resistance” — the network of non-state actors stretching from the Houthis in Yemen to Hezbollah in Lebanon to the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq. Destroy that spine, and the architecture collapses. Israel wants to expand in the Middle East, and a failure to neutralize Iran would be a major setback for its hegemonic plans.

For decades, Israel has lived with a major regional player openly and ideologically committed to its destruction, arming and funding proxy groups that have killed Israeli civilians and launched tens of thousands of rockets and missiles against Israeli targets. The framing of self-defence is not invented — it is genuinely felt. But self-defence and territorial opportunism are not mutually exclusive. The question is which one drives strategic planning.

A crucial strategic declaration sharpened this trajectory: in January 2026, Prime Minister Netanyahu announced his intention to end US military dependence, calling for Israel to become a “super Sparta” — a highly militarized warrior state with a self-sufficient military industry, capable of defying international pressure and arms embargoes. A state that can fight without American permission is a state that can take territory without American restraint.

THE TURKEY PROBLEM AND THE NATO CALCULATION

If any single piece of evidence reveals the true architecture of this moment, it is the NATO question. Trump’s recent threats to leave the alliance — framed publicly as frustration at allies who refused to join the Iran war or help reopen the Strait of Hormuz — carry a more pointed subtext that has been spoken plainly by those inside the machinery of power.

Joe Kent, former US director of the National Counterterrorism Centre, said in a social media post that a potential US withdrawal from NATO would not be to avoid foreign entanglements but to back Israel in any fighting against Turkey. “We’ll be leaving NATO so we can side with Israel when Turkey and Israel eventually clash in Syria,” Kent wrote. Kent resigned from his position in March, citing opposition to the Iran war itself — which makes his assessment all the more credible. He is not an advocate for this trajectory. He is a witness to it.

Turkey is a NATO member. Under Article 5, a military attack on Turkey obligates a US military response. Turkey and Israel have been engaged in a strategic conflict over what Syria should look like after the December 2024 ouster of Bashar al-Assad. Turkey wants a stable Syrian state under its sphere of influence to combat Kurdish autonomy movements, while Israel prefers a fragmented Syria. These interests are not merely competitive — they are structurally incompatible. A showdown over Syrian territory, where Israeli jets already operate and Turkish forces are deeply embedded, becomes increasingly likely as Iran’s ability to deter Israeli military action diminishes.

Trump branded NATO a “paper tiger” after some of its members refused to lead efforts to open the Strait of Hormuz and limited US forces from using bases on their territories. The anger was real. But the deeper logic being surfaced by figures like Kent is that NATO is less an inconvenience than an obstacle — a legal constraint that prevents the United States from siding with Israel against a treaty ally. Withdrawal resolves that constraint cleanly.

THE REGIME CHANGE ILLUSION

Washington’s stated objective — that a liberated Iranian people would seize the moment, overthrow the theocracy, and welcome a new secular order — has collided with a far messier reality. Several weeks into the war, no large-scale uprising against the regime manifested.

The reasons are structural. The Iranian political order is not centred on a single individual; it is sustained by a complex and institutionalized network of political, military, economic, and religious power structures. Authority is distributed across these interconnected institutions, collectively ensuring continuity and stability. At the core is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which serves not only as a military organization but also as a significant political and economic force — often described as a “state within a state.”

The assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on February 28 was supposed to be the decapitating blow. Instead, the war gave more power to hardline military factions inside Iran’s complex governance system while bolstering anti-American sentiment. “This regime is more hardline, less prone to compromise and, frankly, more nakedly tied to the IRGC,” according to Mona Yacoubian of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The new hardline IRGC commander was publicly scathing about Iran’s civilian leadership, while the IRGC reported recruiting interest so high it lowered the enrolment age to 12. Whatever political space once existed for moderate reform voices has been incinerated by the bombs. The war did not weaken the hardliners. It crowned them.

The opposition landscape offers no easy alternative. Despite years of widespread discontent, no unified opposition has emerged that adequately represents Iran’s ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity — including Arabs, Kurds, Baloch, Azeris, and others. Opposition spaces often reproduce dominant cultural narratives that prioritize certain identities over others. Reza Pahlavi, the exiled former crown prince, has been given prominent Western media platforms, but Trump himself expressed skepticism that Pahlavi could run Iran, stating someone already within Iran “would be more appropriate.” Yet no such consensus political figure exists, complicating the organization of any coherent domestic opposition movement.

Factionalism and political infighting within the political class are intense, but a combination of ideological conviction and cronyism serves as a unifying force tying the elite to the system. Sanctions, which have been applied for nearly 45 years, have not broken this cohesion. Bombs, apparently, are strengthening it.

THE CHAOS BENEFICIARIES: ISIS, AL-QAEDA, AND THE SECURITY VACUUM

No analysis of this war is complete without accounting for the groups that feed on disorder — and that now find themselves operating in conditions tailor-made for their resurgence.

In January 2026, a northeastern Syria offensive by the Syrian transitional government against the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces created a significant security vacuum, resulting in the escape and mass transfer of thousands of Islamic State detainees. Following the SDF’s withdrawal from key detention facilities, the US military began relocating up to 9,000 detainees to Iraq to prevent an IS resurgence. These are not abstract numbers. They represent the re-seeding of a movement that took a decade of collective international effort to suppress.

In Syria, Al-Qaeda affiliates have already moved to exploit the chaos. The group Ajnad Bayt al-Maqdis claimed responsibility for several attacks against US and Israeli targets in Syria, describing its actions as a response to the “Zio-Crusader campaign.” In Iraq, pro-Iranian groups including the Islamic Resistance have struck US military assets, while Iraqi authorities warned that strikes near Baghdad International Airport threatened a prison housing thousands of ISIS detainees recently transferred from Syria.

The bitter irony is one that Joe Kent himself named in his resignation statement: the Syria policy that dismantled a secular government and empowered a new administration with Al-Qaeda lineage has created the precise chaos in which both jihadist groups and Israeli territorial ambitions can simultaneously advance. The war on terror and the project of Greater Israel are not in opposition. In the current configuration, they are mutually enabling.

RUSSIA, UKRAINE, AND THE ART OF STRATEGIC DISTRACTION

Russia has not fired a shot in this war. It does not need to. Russia’s role has focused on intelligence sharing and logistical aid, avoiding direct combat to prevent straining its resources amid the Ukraine conflict. US officials reported that Moscow supplied Iran with real-time data on American warships and aircraft, enabling more precise retaliatory strikes.

The returns have been extraordinary. Since the US-Israeli strikes on Iran and Tehran’s retaliatory attacks on Gulf targets, Brent crude jumped to around $84 per barrel — its highest level in over a year — with Russian Urals blend prices climbing well above Moscow’s 2026 budget breakeven point. Putin’s war in Ukraine, which was beginning to face genuine fiscal pressure, has been financially reprieved by a conflict Russia had no part in starting.

Meanwhile, American Patriot air-defense missiles have been moved from Europe toward the Middle East as Washington redirects resources to its war on Iran. Washington’s peace efforts on Ukraine are largely on hold while the White House is, in the words of one senior official, “totally distracted by Iran.” Russia launched one of its largest drone barrages of the entire war in late March — nearly 1,000 drones in a single night — with the confidence of a power that knows the world’s attention has moved elsewhere.

Ukraine, for its part, has sought to use the chaos to its own advantage, arming Gulf states with anti-drone technology and positioning itself as an indispensable partner. But the structural reality remains that Russia is profiting from the war while backing Iran, and the Middle East has effectively become a new front in the broader contest between Kyiv and Moscow.

WHAT IS ACTUALLY BEING BUILT

Step back from the tactical noise — the ceasefire announcements, the Strait of Hormuz shipping updates, the IRGC’s Telegram dispatches — and a structural pattern emerges with uncomfortable clarity.

Israel’s economy is now structured around its military industry, which has been carrying the broader economy since global isolation decimated most other sectors. The result is that Israel now has an additional structural incentive to be in a perpetual state of war. This is not incidental. It is load-bearing. An Israeli state that requires war to sustain its economy is an Israeli state for which peace carries an unacceptable cost.

The window for realising the “Greater Israel” project with US support may be shrinking, which could make Israeli actions more desperate and more risky in the coming months and years. The 2026 US midterms and the 2028 presidential election represent inflection points. The political coalition that has enabled this war is not permanent. The operations are being conducted at pace precisely because time may be running out.

In that light, the war in Iran reads not as a response to an existential threat, but as the opening of a window — one that, for Israel, may not open again for a generation. A broken Iran means broken Hezbollah, broken Hamas, broken Houthis, broken Popular Mobilization Forces. It means a Lebanon that can be politically restructured, a Syria that can be territorially absorbed, a Jordan Valley that can be quietly claimed, and a Turkey that — if NATO is no longer a constraint — can be confronted.

The nuclear program was the justification. The land is the objective.

And somewhere beneath the rubble of Tehran and the bureaucratic land registrations of the West Bank, the architecture of a redrawn Middle East is already being laid.

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SOURCES

Al Jazeera. “Iran Remains an Obstacle to the ‘Greater Israel’ Project.” April 14, 2026.

Al Jazeera. “What Is Greater Israel, and How Popular Is It Among Israelis?” February 26, 2026.

Al Jazeera. “‘New Layer of Apartheid’: Israel Ramps Up West Bank’s De Facto Annexation.” February 9, 2026.

Al Jazeera. “Trump-Netanyahu’s ‘War in Search of a Strategy.’” March 7, 2026.

Amnesty International. “Israel/OPT: Global Impunity Fueling Israel’s Unlawful Annexation Measures in the West Bank.” February 27, 2026.

Atlantic Council. “Twenty Questions (and Expert Answers) About the Iran War.” March 16, 2026.

Bertelsmann Transformation Index. “Iran Country Report 2026.” BTI Project.

Britannica. “2026 Iran War.” Updated April 22, 2026.

Chatham House. “The Iran War Exposes the Limits of Russia’s Leverage in a Fragmenting Regional Order.” March 2, 2026.

Christian Science Monitor. “Iran’s ‘New’ Regime Looks Much the Same, Only Harsher.” April 20, 2026.

Christian Science Monitor. “For Ukraine and Russia, Widening Iran War Presents Peril and Possibility.” March 15, 2026.

Council on Foreign Relations. “The Iran Conflict Is Becoming a Russia-Ukraine Proxy War.” March 30, 2026.

Democratic Solidarity Party of Al-Ahwaz. “Why Regime Change Has Not Yet Been Achieved in the Iranian Context: A Structural Analysis.” March 30, 2026.

Euronews. “Trump Again Berates NATO, Calls It ‘Disappointing.’” April 9, 2026.

Fair Observer. “Why Iran’s Collapse Requires Decisive American and Israeli Intervention.” January 14, 2026.

Foreign Policy Research Institute. “From Tehran to Donbas: What the Iran War Means for Russia and Ukraine.” March 20, 2026.

Georgetown Journal of International Affairs. “The War Against Iran and Global Risks: ‘Tell Me How This Ends.’” March 26, 2026.

House of Commons Library. “Iran: What Challenges Face the Country in 2026?” January 9, 2026.

House of Commons Library. “Iran Protests 2026: UK and International Response.” Updated April 2026.

Hudson Institute. “The Ayatollah’s Regime Is Crumbling.” Michael Doran. January 2026.

Jerusalem Strategic Tribune. “The Impact of Middle East Upheaval on Ukraine.” March 4, 2026.

Mondoweiss. “The New Era of Israeli Expansionism and the War Economy That Fuels It.” February 4, 2026.

PBS NewsHour. “Iran War Deflects Attention from Ukraine as an Emboldened Russia Starts Spring Offensive.” March 2026.

Security Council Report. “Syria, April 2026 Monthly Forecast.” April 1, 2026.

Security Distillery, The. “The Iran War’s Strategic Spillover into the Ukraine-Russia Conflict.” April 19, 2026.

Türkiye Today. “Unpacking Joe Kent’s Türkiye-Israel Scenario as Trump Threatens NATO Exit.” April 9, 2026.

Turkish Minute. “Former US Official Says Possible US Exit from NATO Would Be to Side with Israel in Turkey Clash.” April 9, 2026.

United Nations Human Rights Office. “Israel’s Settlement Expansion Drives Mass Displacement in West Bank.” March 17, 2026.

Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Annexation by Design: How Israel’s New West Bank Policies Are Reshaping the Conflict and Testing U.S. Strategy.” February 26, 2026.

Wikipedia. “2026 Iran War.” Updated April 22, 2026.

Wikipedia. “Iraq in the 2026 Iran War.” Updated April 2026.

Wikipedia. “Islamic State.” Updated April 2026.

Wikipedia. “Proposed Israeli Annexation of the West Bank.” Updated April 2026.

Wikipedia. “Regime Change Efforts in the 2026 Iran War.” Updated April 2026.

Wikipedia. “Russia in the 2026 Iran War.” Updated April 2026.

Wikipedia. “Syria in the 2026 Iran War.” Updated April 2026.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Iran failed to show up at the agreed-upon Islamabad negotiations with JD Vance and company.

They are heading home!

Trump has extended the deadline for a deal to an indefinite period?

Iran drops another Lego video.

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According to retired CIA analyst Larry Johnson: During an emergency meeting On Saturday Trump tried to “use the nuclear codes” on Iran and he was stopped by General Dan Caine.

According to Johnson “there is something wrong @realDonaldTrump

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Why Canada and the US Must Put Their Own People Firest!

Every time a Canadian or American fills their tank, they pay a price set not by their government, not by production costs, and not by any obligation owed to the people who own the land beneath the wells. They pay a price set by a global commodity market that answers to shareholders in Houston, London, and Riyadh. The oil under their feet, extracted by companies operating on public lands with public subsidies, goes to the highest bidder on international markets. The citizen who owns that land by birthright must compete for it like any foreign buyer.

Canada is one of the world's top five oil producers. In 2024, the country exported more than 4.2 million barrels per day, generating over $100 billion in crude oil export revenue. The United States, meanwhile, is the world's single largest oil producer at more than 13 million barrels per day. Together, these two countries sit atop one of the greatest energy endowments in human history. Their citizens pay world market prices anyway, prices dictated by OPEC decisions, Middle Eastern conflict, and commodity traders who have never set foot in Alberta or Texas.

This is not a natural law of capitalism. It is a policy outcome, the direct consequence of governments that have chosen, decade after decade, to prioritize the export earnings of private corporations over the energy security of their own people. The oil industry has sold this arrangement as the only possible one, dressed it in the language of free markets, and funded the politicians who protect it. The result is a system in which record corporate profit and citizen hardship are not contradictions. They are two sides of the same ledger.

Consider what happened during the 2022 energy price crisis. As families in both countries strained under record high gas prices, ExxonMobil posted $17.9 billion in a single quarter. Chevron earned $11.6 billion. Shell cleared $16.7 billion. Three companies, three months, $46 billion. In the four years since Russia invaded Ukraine, five major oil companies recorded nearly $467 billion in total profits and returned $444 billion of that directly to shareholders through buybacks and dividends. That figure exceeds the entire European Union's clean energy spending in 2025. In Canada, the response from Ottawa was silence.

The industry's defence is always the same. Global markets are global. Prices are set internationally. To sell domestically below market rates would distort investment and harm supply. This argument sounds reasonable until you look at countries that tried something different and succeeded.

THE MODEL EXISTS

Australia faced a near identical problem in 2022 when LNG exporters shipped product abroad while domestic consumers faced shortages and spiralling prices. The government's Domestic Gas Security Mechanism, introduced in 2017, required exporters to supply a defined percentage of reserves to the domestic market before being eligible to export. Western Australia went further, mandating that 15% of gas reserves be supplied domestically. It was imperfect but the architecture of accountability existed. Citizens had a claim. Companies had an obligation.

Norway is the deeper lesson. When oil was discovered in 1969, the Norwegian government made a deliberate decision: this resource belongs to the Norwegian people, and the Norwegian people will capture its value. The state oil company was created in 1972. Profits above a threshold are taxed at rates approaching 78% on upstream earnings. Surplus revenues are deposited into the Government Pension Fund Global, now the world's largest sovereign wealth fund at nearly $1.9 trillion, roughly $350,000 per Norwegian citizen. Norway runs among the lowest domestic energy costs in Europe. It achieved this not by seizing everything, but by establishing one foundational principle: the state holds the superior claim on natural resource wealth, not the corporation.

Canada and the United States have functionally inverted this logic. Corporations hold the superior claim. Citizens are residual beneficiaries of royalty and tax arrangements that the industry lobbies to minimize at every budget cycle.

HOW THE SYSTEM WORKS AGAINST YOU

Oil is priced globally against benchmarks: West Texas Intermediate for US crude, Western Canadian Select for Alberta heavy oil. When a company extracts a barrel in Saskatchewan or North Dakota, it sells at or near those benchmark prices regardless of the buyer. A Canadian refinery pays the same price as a refinery in South Korea. There is no domestic discount. There is no citizenship premium. The only thing determining where oil goes is who bids highest.

This is why Atlantic Canada, sitting inside one of the world's great oil producing nations, has historically imported oil from Saudi Arabia, Algeria, and the United States for its own refineries. The pipelines run west to export, not east to consumer. Eastern Canadians pay world market prices for imported foreign oil while western Canadian oil is exported at world market prices to foreign buyers. Both ends of the country are exposed to global price volatility. Neither end has a domestic supply guarantee.

The Trans Mountain Expansion Project, completed in 2024 at enormous public cost and political controversy, was framed as a national interest project. Its primary function is to give Alberta heavy crude better access to international buyers, thereby raising the price Canadian refiners must pay for the same oil. The pipeline built with Canadian political capital is, in material terms, a mechanism for charging Canadians more at the pump.

In the United States, the picture is structurally the same. American oil companies extract on public and private land, price to WTI, and export at record volumes following the 2015 lifting of the export ban. The shale revolution, celebrated as an energy independence achievement, became an export bonanza. American consumers still pay globally indexed prices. Energy independence turned out to mean freedom for the companies to sell globally, not freedom for the citizen from global price shocks.

WHAT THE FIX LOOKS LIKE

The solution is not complicated in concept. Its implementation requires political will that the industry will resist ferociously, which is precisely why naming it clearly matters.

First, legislated Domestic Supply Obligations. Any company holding a federal or provincial or state extraction licence must supply a defined percentage of its annual production, around 20 to 30%, to domestic refiners at regulated cost-plus pricing before being permitted to export. This is not nationalization. It is a condition of the public licence to exploit a public resource. Australia's Western Australia reservation model and Norway's emergency delivery provisions are the templates.

Second, cost-plus domestic pricing. Domestic supply obligations mean nothing if priced at market. The regulated domestic price should be set at verifiable cost of production plus a capped margin. In Canada's oil sands, established production costs run roughly $20 to $30 per barrel. A domestic price ceiling tied to production cost rather than global speculation would give companies a fair return while ensuring citizens pay for what it actually costs to get oil out of the ground, not for what a trader in London thinks it is worth today.

Third, mandatory east-west pipeline capacity. In Canada, domestic supply obligations are structurally hollow without infrastructure routing oil eastward. The federal government must mandate that a percentage of national pipeline capacity be reserved for domestic inter-provincial supply. This would, over time, end Atlantic Canada's dependency on foreign imports and establish a genuine national energy market.

Fourth, a windfall levy recycled as a consumer dividend. When global oil prices spike above a defined threshold, companies operating under Canadian or American licences pay an escalating levy on the excess revenue. That levy is rebated directly to citizens as energy cost relief. The higher global prices go, the more the domestic consumer is insulated. British Columbia's carbon dividend model provides a precedent for direct-to-citizen revenue recycling, however imperfect.

Fifth, sovereign wealth accumulation. Norway's fund holds nearly $1.9 trillion. Canada has no equivalent. The United States has no equivalent. A mandatory percentage of federal and provincial or state royalty revenues should be directed into a constitutionally protected fund, invested for long-term public benefit, and insulated from annual budget politics. This does not reduce what companies earn. It ensures that the public share stays public.

THE OBJECTIONS ANSWERED

The industry will say below-market domestic pricing reduces investment and production. This is partly true at the margin. The answer is structural: cost-plus pricing with a guaranteed return still allows companies to profit. The domestic supply obligation applies only to a defined percentage of production. Companies retain full market pricing on the rest. If the licence condition is too onerous, they can surrender the licence and a state-linked entity can take it up. The resource does not disappear because a private company finds the terms insufficiently generous.

They will say mandatory supply creates shortages as producers withhold output. This is addressed by tying the obligation to the licence itself. Governments have the power to revoke extraction licences. They have simply chosen not to use it.

They will say domestic pricing violates trade agreements. Some structures would require renegotiating elements of CUSMA and potentially WTO commitments. This is a genuine complication, not an insurmountable barrier. Australia implemented domestic gas reservation without triggering WTO collapse. Trade agreements are renegotiated when political will exists. The same industry claiming trade agreements make domestic pricing impossible spent years lobbying for the trade agreements that made it complicated. The sequencing is not accidental.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Nothing described above is technically difficult. Regulatory frameworks, pricing models, pipeline allocation policies, and windfall levies are standard instruments of resource governance used by countries across the political spectrum. The reason Canada and the United States have not implemented them is not complexity. It is capture.

The oil and gas industry is among the most politically connected in both countries. Its lobbying spend is vast, its revolving door with regulatory agencies is well-documented, and its campaign contributions reach across both parties. The policy architecture keeping domestic consumers on global pricing while companies pocket global profits is not a market outcome. It is a lobbied outcome, sustained by politicians who depend on the industry for their campaigns and, often, for their post-political careers.

The oil under Canadian and American soil belongs, in the most fundamental sense, to the people of those countries. The question is whether those people will ever demand the governance that reflects that fact. The next time a finance minister or treasury secretary stands at a podium lamenting energy affordability while the industry writes their re-election cheque, remember: there is a model. Norway built it. Australia approximated it. The only thing standing between North American citizens and cheaper fuel from their own ground is the political will to take it back.

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SOURCES

Canada Energy Regulator. Annual Trade Summary: Crude Oil. 2025.

Canada Energy Regulator. Canadian Exports of Crude Oil and Natural Gas. 2024 and 2025.

US Energy Information Administration. US-Canada Energy Trade. 2025.

Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. Canadian Oil Important for Midwest Gasoline Prices. Brown and Beckemeyer. May 2025.

Global Witness. Oil Supermajors Profit Nearly Half a Trillion Dollars Since Russia's Ukraine Invasion. February 2026.

NBC News. Oil Companies Post Record Earnings as Sky-High Gas Prices Linger. July 2022.

Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. Gas Reservation Policy Design Critical as Conflict Hits Global Supplies. March 2026.

Clime Investment Management. Oil and Gas Wealth: Norway, Britain and Australia's Divergent Paths. 2025.

International Energy Agency. Norway's Legislation on Oil Security. 2025.

C.D. Howe Institute. Quantifying US Benefits from Canadian Crude Oil Exports. Livingston. January 2025.

History does not negotiate. It does not wait for consensus or respect the feelings of those living through it.

That is the first thing Professor Jiang Xueqin wants you to understand before you dismiss what he is saying. He is not being provocative. He is reading patterns. And the patterns are not good.

Jiang is a Yale-educated, China-based geopolitical analyst who has made 111 falsifiable predictions on camera across 24 video lectures since April 2024. His track record on the major calls has been consistently ahead of the mainstream by months, sometimes years. His method is game theory applied to civilisational analysis: identify the players, identify their interests, strip away the ideology and the propaganda, and follow the structural logic wherever it leads.

His central thesis is now impossible to avoid.

The American empire is not declining. It is in the process of destroying itself. And the war in Iran is the mechanism.

The New World Order constructed by George H.W. Bush in 1991 rested on three interlocking pillars: American financial supremacy through Wall Street and the petrodollar, secular multicultural consumerism as ideological glue, and military hegemony as the enforcement mechanism.

The Gulf states sold oil in dollars, took those dollars, and reinvested them in American assets, most recently into AI and data centre investment. The loop was closed. The Ponzi scheme held.

Iran has now blown the loop open.

By closing the Strait of Hormuz, Iran is applying pressure simultaneously on the Gulf monarchies and on the East Asian economies that depend on that passage for the bulk of their energy supply. Japan sources roughly three-quarters of its oil through the Strait and has reportedly been told by its prime minister that it could exhaust reserves within months.

The Gulf states themselves are far more fragile than their skylines suggest.

They import between 80 and 90 percent of their food supply through the same passage. The millionaires are already moving to Singapore.

America is addicted to the petrodollar. The country carries $40 trillion in debt, sustained by a Ponzi scheme in which Gulf petrodollar recycling props up the financial bubble underlying the entire US economy. If that recycling stops, Jiang argues, the depression that follows would make the 1930s look manageable.

That is the imperial logic that drove the United States into this war. Not nukes. The Omani foreign minister reportedly told the world, hours before the strikes on Tehran, that Iran had already agreed to zero uranium enrichment.

The real objective was to prevent Iran from controlling the Strait and turning the Gulf monarchies into Iranian client states. Losing the Middle East means losing the petrodollar. Losing the petrodollar means the debt becomes unpayable and the empire ends.

The problem with empire, as Jiang frames it, is hubris. An empire would rather destroy the world than surrender its power.

And so they are fighting a war they cannot win with a strategy they cannot explain. The Americans have struck desalination plants, civilian oil infrastructure, and an elementary school in southern Iran that killed approximately 170 schoolgirls in the opening days.

The footage from Tehran is of apocalyptic skies and acid rain.

You cannot do that to a country of 90 million people with a deep martyrdom culture and expect compliance to follow.

Now comes the part most Western analysts still refuse to say aloud.

Jiang predicts that a US ground invasion of Iran will be the catalyst that triggers a Second American Civil War.

A consumer society built on individual comfort cannot sustain the sacrifice required for a ground war against a warrior culture defending its homeland. The cognitive dissonance will fracture the country.

The civil war he envisions will not be a simple left-right conflict. It will be a proxy war between elite factions: globalists using the left as their proxy force versus America Firsters mobilising the right.

The globalists are perfectly willing to let Trump launch this war, watch it go badly, and use the midterms to wipe out the Republicans and reinstall a globalist agenda by 2028.

The No Kings protests that recently drew millions into American streets were organised, Jiang notes, by Democratic lobby groups with pro-Zionist orientations. You were permitted to say “no kings.” You were not permitted to say “no war.” The resistance has been captured.

Trump, in Jiang’s reading, sees himself in messianic terms. The ambition is not simply a third term but a fourth, the consolidation of emperor-like executive power that dismantles the constitutional architecture of the republic.

What Trump wants is to transition America away from empire and toward what Jiang calls a techne: a Greater North America, a continental fortress that consolidates Canada, Greenland, Mexico, and parts of the Caribbean, and sells resources to a world at war.

Jiang’s darkest game-theoretic reading asks: what if Trump actually wants the empire to fail? What if the deliberate collapse of the global economy is how you force the transition from a finance-based empire to a resource-based continental fortress? Then the destruction of the petrodollar, the alienation of allies, and the economic shock of the Iran war are features, not bugs.

Not incompetence. Controlled demolition.

What emerges from the wreckage is not a return to American leadership. It is a fractured world of regional powers: China consolidating Eurasia, Russia expanding into the vacuum in Eastern Europe, Iran dominating the Persian Gulf, and an inward-looking authoritarian Greater North America selling its resources to whoever is buying.

History does not care about our feelings. But it does, eventually, demand a reckoning.

GC

President Donald Trump has long boasted about the stock market as a barometer of his success. Yet in recent months, a growing chorus of lawmakers, ethics experts, and market watchers has leveled a far more serious charge: that Trump is actively manipulating stock and commodity prices through erratic tariff announcements and sudden shifts in the ongoing U.S.-Iran war, creating volatility that insiders and allies can exploit for massive gains. The pattern, critics say, is clear — ratchet up tensions or threats to crash prices, then reverse course or signal de-escalation and watch the rebound enrich a select few.

The latest flashpoint came in early April 2025 with sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs that sent global markets into a tailspin. Stocks plunged as investors feared higher costs and trade wars. Then, just hours before Trump dramatically paused most of the tariffs for 90 days, he posted on Truth Social: “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!” signed with his initials “DJT.” Markets roared back to life. The S&P 500 surged, and Trump Media & Technology Group (ticker: DJT) — the parent company of Truth Social — spiked nearly 22 percent in a single day, with another 5 percent gain in pre-market trading.

Democratic senators Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) immediately demanded an urgent investigation. House Democrats, led by Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, announced their own probe into “possible stock manipulation.”

Who benefits? The names and companies are hard to ignore.

• Trump Media & Technology Group (DJT): The president’s own social-media venture saw its shares explode after the tariff pause. Attorney General Pam Bondi sold between $1 million and $5 million in Trump Media stock on April 2 — the very day the initial tariffs were announced and markets cratered — before the rebound.

• Tesla and Elon Musk: Musk, a senior Trump adviser, watched Tesla stock jump 18-23 percent immediately after the pause announcement. Musk’s net worth reportedly swelled by billions amid the volatility.

This playbook has extended into the Iran war, which escalated dramatically in late February 2026 when the U.S. and Israel launched airstrikes on Iranian targets, including nuclear and military sites. Oil prices rocketed as fears grew over the Strait of Hormuz — through which about 20% of the world’s oil flows — with Trump threatening to “obliterate” Iranian power plants and energy infrastructure if the strait wasn’t reopened.

Then came the reversals.

On March 23, 2026, Trump announced a five-day pause on strikes against Iranian energy targets, citing “productive conversations” toward resolving hostilities. Oil prices plunged more than 10%, while stock futures jumped. Minutes before the announcement — at around 6:49 a.m. ET — massive trades hit the futures markets: roughly $580 million in oil futures (with heavy selling, betting on a price drop) and about $1.5 billion in S&P 500 futures (betting on a stock rebound). Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) called it “mind-blowing corruption,” asking pointedly: “Who was it? Trump? A family member? A White House staffer?”

The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission is now probing these suspicious oil trades ahead of Trump’s Iran policy pivots. Iranian officials, including Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, accused Trump of using “fake news” about talks to deliberately manipulate oil and financial markets.

Defense stocks have also seen volatility tied to the conflict. Companies like Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, RTX, and Palantir experienced surges during escalations but faced pressure during pause announcements.

Suspicious activity has included reports of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s broker inquiring about large investments in a defense-focused ETF (including holdings in RTX, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Palantir) in the weeks before major strikes began — though the trade reportedly did not proceed.

Allied lawmakers have faced scrutiny too. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) disclosed purchases of defense-related or tech shares during market dips, while other members timed trades around regional tensions.

This isn’t the first time Congress itself has faced accusations of profiting from non-public information. In fact, lawmakers have a well-documented history of insider trading that makes the current scrutiny look familiar.

The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act of 2012 was supposed to end it. Yet enforcement remains weak, with minimal penalties and no criminal prosecutions to date.

Notable cases include:

• Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL): In 2008, as ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee, he attended a closed-door briefing on the financial crisis and the next day bought options betting on a market collapse — and profited when it did.

• Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC): In early 2020, as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, he received classified COVID-19 briefings and sold hundreds of thousands to over a million dollars in stocks right before the public market plunge.

• Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA): A member of the Senate Health Committee, she made significant stock trades shortly after a closed-door briefing on the economic threat of COVID-19.

More recently, amid the Iran conflict, multiple members of Congress and their families have traded defense stocks. At least 37 lawmakers traded shares of top Pentagon contractors in recent periods, including:

• Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), who traded millions in stocks of companies like Northrop Grumman and Microsoft.

• Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, who added to positions in GE Aerospace and Woodward Inc. before major escalations, with some positions appreciating over 80-100%.

• Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK), who bought into L3Harris Technologies (a provider of missile-defense systems) with strong subsequent returns.

• Rep. Dave Taylor (R-OH) sold oil stocks like Chevron and Marathon Petroleum in March 2026 as the Iran war raged and oil prices spiked.

Rep. Rob Bresnahan Jr. (R-PA) and others have also faced questions over timely trades in hospitals, bonds, or defense sectors aligned with pending votes or briefings.

Whether Trump’s tariff roller-coaster and Iran war announcements constitute illegal market manipulation or simply high-stakes presidential strategy remains for investigators to decide. What is undeniable is the pattern: wild swings in policy and military posture create winners and losers — and the winners’ names keep showing up in the same small circle of billionaires, family-linked companies, administration officials, and Washington insiders.

As Democrats push for hearings, the SEC and CFTC face questions about enforcement, and ordinary investors watch oil prices and portfolios gyrate, the bigger question looms: Is the stock market still a level playing field, or has access to power become the ultimate inside track?

The answer may determine not just market confidence, but public faith in American institutions.

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