March, 3: No1 left to call

Four days to Tehran. Where's the off-ramp?

What came before:

The opening salvo

March, 1: day two

March 2: No1 to call

Yesterday I ended with “four days became four weeks”. I may have been optimistic.

Trump’s now telling reporters wars can be fought “forever” using American stockpiles with a “virtually unlimited” supply of weapons. He posted it on Truth Social, so it should be the Truth, right? Sure, there are plenty of Cold War-era JDAMs - converted MK-84 dumb bombs with a GPS kit strapped on. But Patriots? THAADs? The things actually keeping people alive? Those don’t grow on Truth Social posts. Those take two years per missile to manufacture. And most of the existing ones were gifted to Ukraine. No refunds.

Six American soldiers are dead. Eighteen seriously wounded. The war is four days old. Remember when this was supposed to be a four-day special military operation to Tehran?

The story of the day isn’t the F-15s from yesterday, or the oil markets, or even the ground invasion of Lebanon - although we’ll get to all of those. The story of the day is what Israel did to the Assembly of Experts in Qom.

The Assembly of Experts is the 88-member clerical body constitutionally responsible for selecting Iran’s supreme leader. After killing Khamenei on Saturday, the logical next step in any “regime change” playbook would be to let the succession process collapse under its own contradictions. Let the factions fight. Let the moderates and hardliners tear each other apart.

Classic divide and conquer.

Instead, Israel bombed the building while they were counting the votes.

“We wanted to prevent them from picking a new supreme leader”. - Israeli defence official to Axios

They struck the assembly in Qom while the body was in session. Iranian state media confirmed the building was flattened. Reports of many members killed or wounded. Iran’s Mehr news agency tried to play it down, calling the building “an old, secondary structure” no longer in use - which directly contradicts the Israeli claim that it was struck mid-vote. Both versions can not be true.

The Assembly’s compound in Tehran - the former parliament building - had already been hit overnight. Both locations, in sequence.

Now think about what this means strategically. Yesterday I wrote that Trump had killed his own “very good choices” for Iran’s next leader in the opening strikes, and that Iran’s military units were operating mostly without central command. Today, Israel deliberately destroyed the constitutional mechanism for selecting a replacement. You killed the leader. You killed the people you wanted to replace him with. And now you bombed the room where the country’s legal process for choosing a successor was literally in session.

Who exactly are you planning to negotiate with?

This is either the most incompetent war strategy since... well, since Iraq. Or it’s deliberate. And if it’s deliberate, the implication is that the goal was never negotiation. The goal is permanent decapitation. Keep killing anyone who might consolidate power until there’s no coherent state left to resist. The problem is that Iran pre-authorised decentralised command specifically to survive this scenario. You’re not preventing resistance. You’re preventing surrender.

Iran named a new supreme leader anyway. Alireza Arafi. His opening statement was not what you’d call an olive branch: “The time for negotiations is over”. So the bombing achieved precisely nothing except turning a succession process into another martyrdom narrative.

Again.

Really nailed that one.

Israel invaded Lebanon today. The 91st Division deployed ground forces across the border, capturing positions along the frontier. Clashes with Hezbollah near Kfarkela. Artillery and airstrikes across the south. The cabinet reportedly approved the incursion with 100,000 troops on the border.

Hezbollah responded by firing missiles into central Israel for the first time in this conflict. Sirens in the Tel Aviv metropolitan area. A new escalation corridor that did not exist yesterday morning.

The Lebanese army, under reported US pressure, pulled back from border positions. Literally cleared the road. A senior Hezbollah official said “our patience has run out”. Hezbollah also struck the Ramat David Airbase near Haifa and the Meron surveillance base with cruise missiles. Israel responded by ordering evacuations in Sidon - deep inside Lebanon, well north of the Litani River.

So on day four of a war that was supposed to last four days, we now have a second front. Third if you count the Houthis. Fourth if you count Iraq, where resistance groups have claimed 67 separate operations against US targets in three days.

The stated objective was to destroy Iran’s missile capability. Instead we now have missiles flying from Iran, Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen simultaneously. Task failed successfully.

Now for the diplomatic masterpiece.

Trump, sitting in the Oval Office with German Chancellor Merz, decided this was the perfect moment to threaten a NATO ally with total economic war. Spain had the audacity to say no. Foreign Minister Albares told the US that its bases on Spanish soil - Rota and Morón - could not be used for strikes that weren’t covered by the UN charter. Something about international law. Quaint concept. Fifteen US aircraft were relocated, including refuelling tankers.

Trump’s response was to order Treasury Secretary Bessent to “cut off all trade with Spain”. Then, the part that should give every European capital a sleepless night: “We could use their base if we want. We could just fly in and use it. Nobody’s gonna tell us not to use it”.

The President of the United States just openly suggested he could violate a NATO ally’s sovereignty and use their military bases by force. On camera. While sitting next to the German Chancellor.

Merz’s contribution? He agreed that Spain should pay more for NATO…

Belgium called the entire operation illegal under international law. Spain’s Sánchez called it “unjustifiable”.

These are NATO members, publicly breaking with Washington four days into a war that NATO Secretary General Rutte had enthusiastically endorsed.
The cracks aren’t showing.
The cracks are structural.

Trump also went after the UK for refusing him use of Diego Garcia. “This is not the age of Churchill”, he complained. No, sir. It is not.

The drone war over Iran is evolving in a way that deserves more attention than it’s getting. The IRGC shot down three Israeli drones today - two Elbit Hermes 900s and an IAI Heron. These are not disposable surveillance toys. The Hermes 900 runs about $30 million per unit. The Heron is Israel’s primary SIGINT platform.

Iran is learning to hunt them.

US and Israeli strike planning relies on persistent drone coverage loitering over Iran to find and track mobile missile launchers. If Iran can systematically degrade that coverage, targeting quality drops. “Precision” becomes less precise. The “surgical strikes” get sloppier.

CENTCOM released footage today of strikes on “ballistic missile launchers in Iran”, apparently expecting applause. As if Iran wouldn’t fill the landscape with cheap decoy trucks. Without persistent ISR to tell real launchers from plywood props, you’re playing whack-a-mole blindfolded.

Shooting down the drones is the airborne equivalent of blinding the FPS-132 radar on day one. Same logic, different domain. Remove the eyes, then move freely.

The markets. Oh, the markets.

Global stocks cratered. South Korea down 8%. Japan 6%. Germany 5%. Nasdaq futures off 200 points. The S&P 500, gold, silver, bitcoin, bonds - all down together, which is your classic “everything sell-off” when institutional money panics and runs for the exits.

Except oil. Oil remembered what planet it was on.

Brent surged past $85. WTI hit $77, erasing every single penny of decline since Trump’s inauguration. The entire “Trump energy renaissance” narrative, gone. Four days. Iraq shut down Rumaila - the world’s second-largest oil field, 1.5 million barrels per day - amid escalating military activity. Iran hit Fujairah in the UAE, the Middle East’s largest bunkering terminal and a key crude loading point. Not a military target. An economic one. The message: no oil leaves without permission.

The IRGC reiterated Hormuz is closed and oil will hit $200. Shipping through the strait is down 81%. As Lloyd’s List said: “the Strait was closed not by Iran, but by shipping itself”. The insurers won’t cover it. The tanker captains won’t transit. Iran doesn’t need to physically blockade anything.

Trump’s solution? He ordered the Development Finance Corporation to provide insurance for ships transiting the Gulf, and floated the idea of US Navy escorts through Hormuz. Didn’t we try that with the Houthis already? How’d that go?

Silver bounced between $90 and $77 today. Wild swings. Lease rates keep creeping higher, the swap keeps turning more negative. Don’t get distracted by registered inventory rising on COMEX - eligible is falling faster, total stock is still declining. The physical shortage is extreme and nobody seems to have figured out yet that you need a lot of silver to build the very weapons currently being expended at record pace. War is bullish for silver in a way that most traders haven’t even begun to price in. But COMEX gonna COMEX.

Gold touched $5,380 before being walked back. When 30% of global oil supply is offline and your safe haven asset drops like a stone, you’re not watching a market. Someone desperately needs the dials to read “everything is fine” while missiles hit hotels on the Palm.

Something that got almost no coverage but matters more than most of today’s headlines: US military commanders across more than 30 installations told their troops this war is part of “God’s plan” and linked it to Armageddon. A commander reportedly said Trump had been “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth”.

This was not one rogue officer at one remote base. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation says it received hundreds of complaints. Every branch of the military. Coordinated messaging.

If the people executing this war believe they’re fulfilling biblical prophecy, there is no off-ramp. You can not negotiate the end of Armageddon. There is no ceasefire clause in the Book of Revelation. This is the ideological backdrop against which American 20-year-olds are being told to fight and die in a country most of them couldn’t find on a map last week.

Raise your hand if you had this on your New Year’s Bingo card!

Bahrain is coming apart. Riots across the country. The majority Shia population is in the streets demanding the government expel US forces. Saudi Arabia sent security forces across the King Fahd Causeway - the only bridge connecting Saudi to Bahrain - to help the monarchy contain the protests. Exactly what they did in 2011 during the Arab Spring. Iran’s response was elegant: they droned the bridge. Cut the troop pipeline with one strike.

There is now a regional war providing cover for something the Bahraini monarchy has feared for decades.

Bahrainis were outside cheering as Iranian missiles hit US facilities. The US 5th Fleet is headquartered in Bahrain. If the popular uprising succeeds - or even gets close - the entire US naval command structure in the Gulf becomes untenable. Iran doesn’t need to sink the 5th Fleet. It needs the country hosting the 5th Fleet to ask them to leave.

The regime change is happening. Just not in the country they planned it for.

The US Embassy in Riyadh was hit by Iranian drones. Part of the main building’s roof collapsed. Embassy in Beirut: closed. Kuwait: closed. Three US embassies shuttered, several more on limited operations.

The State Department told Americans to immediately leave Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the UAE, and Yemen. Leave immediately.

Breaking news. Emphasis on breaking. Not on news.

One more thing.

A Russian-made Kometa-M anti-jamming unit was found in the wreckage of an Iranian Shahed drone that hit RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus. The reverse Shahed pipeline is real. Russia received the original drone design from Iran, improved it through two years of combat in Ukraine, and is now feeding the upgrades back. The Geran-2 variants flying over Ukraine are several generations ahead of the original Shahed-136. Now those improvements are showing up in Iranian drones hitting NATO territory. Full circle.

Meanwhile, Chinese military cargo planes have reportedly been flying into Iran for days. A single Chinese factory can outproduce Iran's entire drone program. The production capacity behind Iran’s drone war isn’t Iranian. It’s Chinese. And it is, for all intents and purposes, unlimited.

Trump’s “virtually unlimited” munitions versus China’s actually unlimited manufacturing capacity…

The White House released Operation Epic Fury’s official objectives. Demilitarisation. Regime elimination. Homeland protection.

Putin’s speechwriter must be flattered.

Trump told reporters: “They want to talk. I said ‘too late!’”

Iran doesn’t want to talk. Iran rejected the ceasefire on day one because they believe the June 2025 ceasefire was a strategic error. And now Trump is pretending to refuse negotiations that aren’t being offered, while simultaneously begging Italy to back-channel a way out of this war.

Four days became four weeks. Four weeks will become “whatever it takes”. And nobody, on any side, has a plausible theory of how this ends.

Still devolving...