Links 10/3/2026 Plus Short Iran War/Narrative Note

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In Nat’s Iran War post on Thursday, many commenters weighed in, including to opine that the quality of comments had decayed of late.

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Back to the comments/content issues. Reader Expat2Uruguay noted that the comments quality had declined, to the degree that she did not find them to be terribly informative. We certainly are not at the extremely high and insightful as we had early in the Iran war. Some of that is likely due to fatigue with an attritional war as well as some dropping out for a while due to personal demands such as travel (but we do seem to have lost raspberry jam; her e-mail address, with a personal domain name, is no longer working).

Covering the Iran war, which many of you have said you have appreciated keenly, has become more difficult as the US fog-making has increased and the Iran side has gone from being highly reliable to less so. On top of that, Trump’s success in manipulating paper oil markets has wrong-footed some top energy analysts who pay attention to fundamentals (and their upset about that skews the commentary from some of them….who also opine on macroeconomics, which is not their beat and it shows). Trump’s ongoing gaslighting and shows of extreme aggression are now well in the Groundhog Day terrain, which is designed to and has had some success in drowning out analysis and commentary.

On top of that, many commentators who have favored the Iran side (if nothing else by virtue of being anti-genocide, ani-imperialism, and/or anti-Trump) have become frustrated with some inexplicable-seeming Iran responses, like not attacking US naval vessels when it seems to be able to do so, or letting more oil transit, and have taken to trying to force-fit evidence into their priors, or worse, ad-hominem attacks on sources that don’t hew to their views. On the transit issue specifically, Trita Parsi had a good talk with Mario Nawfal in which that topic came up. Parsi, who recall has very good contacts on the Iran side and with the negotiators, said more oil was being allowed to pass. He would have treated that as contested or exaggerated if anyone on the Iran side were disputing that in a serious way. Parsi did point out that the US was over-hyping the amount getting out by citing figures on peak days, when passage on other days was much lower. He added this operation is taking place at great cost to the US, implying it can’t be sustained for all that long.

And we have not been all that excited about the argument over how much oil is actually transiting. Even if you take the numbers from private sector sources deemed to be shills, it’s still markedly below pre-war levels. The world will have to engage in a combination of drawing down more on badly shrunken inventories and using less (which means recessions). This is still an energy starvation diet. If you need 2000 calories a day to survive, you will starve if limited to 500 or 1000 calories a day. It just happens more slowly on 1000 calories a day.

But wars are not won with narratives. They are won with logistics, armaments, force discipline and size, and in the case of Iran, a geography which makes it extremely conquest-resistant. Narratives can, however, serve to keep a losing or disadvantaged combatant in the game beyond what ought to be his quit date, resulting in higher cost to both him and his opponent.

There is more and more evidence of US depletion becoming even more extreme despite the Administration bluster. Brandon Weichert discussed with Karen Kwaitkowski and others that the US moving in another aircraft carrier and more ground forces may be a rotation and not a bulking up. Trump has notably failed to deliver on a key threat of tanker-for-tanker destruction.

On the energy side, one reason for Iran being more measured than it logically should be may be the result of actions on other energy fronts. Putin had just announced there will be no more diesel exports until sanctions are lifted. China has halted energy exports when its refiners have been described as the only meaningful remaining global spare capacity. US refiners have scheduled, as in contracted-for maintenance coming, so US output looks destined to drop off even if there are no mishaps like a Gulf hurricane or a big outage. The successful US pressure to get the EU to tap into its diesel reserves is yet another band-aid over a gunshot wound.

Finally, one reader argued we should not be covering Iran but finance. However, this is neither the runup to the crisis, where there was a lot of data about certain parts of the equation, like reset terms on subprime mortgages, and and active and expert econoblogsphere ferreting out more, nor is this a Cyprus banking or Greek bailout crisis, where a lot could be divined from negotiation dynamics, regulatory matters, and fundamentals. The action now is in private debt and even journalists who have put shoulder to wheel (as in have done a lot of interviews) have admitted they have not gotten very far. One indictor: look at the absolutely enormous it has taken for Ed Zitron to reach some conclusions about the economics of the big AI players.

And readers make clear they are not interested in anything that does not suit their anti-imperialist priors. Reader Expat2Uruguay pointed to a recent post, De-Dollarization Is a YouTube Urban Legend , which got no comments for many many hours and in the end garnered only a few. Why should I bother telling readers what is going on when no one is interested? At least when I took a very unpopular view during the Greek bailout crisis, that the plucky Greeks would not prevail (and they did not), I got extremely heated pushback. Being completely ignored says this audience has very little appetite for analysis…either on finance topics generally or on findings that do not conform to erroneous but emotionally appealing story lines.

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World’s oceans absorbed record heat equal to 40 times annual global energy use Guardian

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Watch as an indigenous Bolivian legislator confronts US reps in the Bolivian assembly about why they’re there, and why they’re distributing QR codes to their pals in the legislature.