Murder for Profit
How billionaires greed puts people in dire need
On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched air strikes against Iran, killed its Supreme Leader, and started a war nobody voted for. A war that had one purpose: to further consolidate power for the already powerful.
Fast forward two months. The United Nations Secretary-General is warning of a global food emergency.
A war predicated on one man’s ego. A global food crisis that was entirely avoidable. The connection is the Strait of Hormuz — a waterway two miles wide at its narrowest point, through which twenty percent of the world’s oil and natural gas passed before the shooting started. Roughly three thousand vessels used it every month. That number is now approximately five percent of what it was. Tankers are stranded. Cargo ships are stranded. Tens of thousands of maritime workers cannot move. Oil is up. Food is down.
Brent crude closed Monday at $108 per barrel. That is fifty percent higher than when the war began.
The people who go hungry because of this are not in Washington. They are not in Tel Aviv. They are not in Palm Beach. They are not Trump’s children. But perhaps they should be.
The Deal on the Table
Iran has made an offer.
Passed through Pakistan — one of the few countries still trusted by both sides — Tehran’s proposal is straightforward: the United States lifts its blockade of Iranian ports, the war ends, and negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program begin in a later phase. Simple, workable, and more than Trump deserves.
Iran gets to reopen the strait. The world gets its shipping lanes back. The nuclear question gets addressed through diplomacy rather than bombs.
Trump is expected to reject it. What does that say about power? Nothing good.
The stated reason for rejecting Iran’s offer is its nuclear program. Marco Rubio went on Fox News Monday and said it plainly: “We can’t let them get away with it. We have to ensure that any deal that is made, any agreement that is made, is one that definitively prevents them from sprinting towards a nuclear weapon at any point.” This from an administration that launched a war and accomplished none of its stated objectives.
The nuclear program that survived the February 28 strikes. The nuclear program that survived two months of war. The nuclear program that, according to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, has left the United States “humiliated” in this conflict. A pretext that outlasted the war built around it.
The real reason Trump will reject the deal is simpler than Rubio’s Fox News framing. Accepting it requires acknowledging that the war accomplished nothing. It requires a climbdown from a president who told the American people on March 9 that Iran’s military had been destroyed and the strait had reopened. Neither of those things was true when he said them. Both of them remain untrue today. Ego and hubris are Trump’s lifelong downfalls.
The lie requires the war to continue. It requires the strait to stay closed. The strait being closed requires the world to go hungry. The world going hungry does not bother Trump in the slightest. He only cares about himself and his billionaire enablers. I’m talking to you, Jeff Bezos. I’m talking to you, Peter Thiel. I’m talking to you, Elon Musk.
That is the chain of causation. Follow it to the end.
Who Benefits
Brent crude at $108 per barrel benefits Russian oligarchs who sell oil at whatever price the market sets. They have no stake in the strait reopening. It benefits the Trump family, which has been documented trading on military information through Polymarket — a prediction market on whose advisory board Don Jr. sits — in the same weeks the blockade was imposed.
A U.S. Army soldier was arrested last week for making $400,000 betting on inside information about the Venezuela raid. The Trump family made more than one hundred times that on the same categories of information. The soldier got arrested. The Trump family made millions.
Brent crude at $108 per barrel also benefits every fossil fuel company that spent decades and billions of dollars ensuring the United States would never seriously pursue energy independence. The war in Iran is, in part, the return on that investment. It always was. Antonia Juhasz has spent twenty years documenting the through line from Iraq to Iran — the consistent pattern of American military action in the Persian Gulf being structured around the question of who controls the oil.
The question cui bono — who benefits — answers itself when you look at the price of a barrel of crude.
The People Who Don’t Benefit
The UN Secretary-General António Guterres told the Security Council Monday that the humanitarian toll is mounting. Shipping disruptions are hitting vulnerable countries hardest. Fertilizer prices are rising. Food prices are rising. The countries least able to absorb those increases are absorbing them. This is how capitalism works.
Those countries did not vote for this war. Their governments did not authorize it. Their populations had no say in the decision made by two governments — one of which bypassed its own Congress to start it, the other of which is currently under ICC indictment for war crimes in Gaza — to assassinate Iran’s Supreme Leader and bomb its nuclear facilities on February 28.
The Doctrine of Discovery, which I wrote about in Essay 2 of this series, established in 1493 that certain people had no legal standing. Their land could be taken, their labor extracted, their lives ended, without accountability to any law the taking power recognized as binding.
The people who will go hungry because the Strait of Hormuz is closed have no legal standing in the calculation being made in Washington right now. Their hunger is not a variable in Trump’s Situation Room meeting today. Their children are not in the room. Their governments sent statements to the Security Council. China and Russia vetoed the resolutionthat might have helped. They will starve and die for ego, greed, and indifference.
The strait is two miles wide. The people who control those two miles control the price of food for the entire planet.
That is not a metaphor. That is the operational reality of what empire means in 2026.
The Ceasefire That Isn’t
Trump extended the ceasefire indefinitely last week. The ceasefire has largely halted the bombing. It has not reopened the strait. Iran says it cannot fully reopen the strait because it has lost track of some of the mines it planted — a detail that should terrify every maritime insurer in the world.
The UK and France have hosted two conferences on reopening the strait. They produced a statement. Thirty-eight countries signed it. The strait remains closed.
Meanwhile, Iran’s Foreign Minister flew to Moscow on Monday, where Vladimir Putin praised the Iranian people for “bravely and heroically fighting for their sovereignty” and promised to do everything possible to bring peace to the Middle East. Russia, which benefits from oil at $108 per barrel, has been a consistent backer of Tehran throughout this conflict. The incentive structure is not complicated.
This is what stalemate looks like when the people making the decisions don’t pay the price of the stalemate. Trump’s approval rating is underwater. The midterms are coming. Oil prices are a political problem for him domestically. But the Yemeni family that cannot afford food because fertilizer prices spiked when the strait closed — they are not a political problem for anyone sitting in Washington or Tel Aviv.
They are the collateral damage of a war that was never about them and was always about something else.
What the History Says
This is not the first time the Persian Gulf has been used as a lever in a conflict that had nothing to do with the people living near it.
The 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War — which the United States actively supported on both sides at various points, supplying Iraq with intelligence while covertly selling weapons to Iran — killed approximately one million people and ended with neither side having achieved its objectives. I’ve seen the bullet holes in the helmets of the dead. When I was an occupier in Iraq.
The 1991 Gulf War was framed as a response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. It was also the establishment of the permanent American military footprint in Saudi Arabia that Osama bin Laden cited as his primary grievance in 1998. The war that was supposed to protect the oil created the conditions for the attacks that justified the next war. The United States emerged with military basing rights in the Gulf and a permanent presence in the region’s oil infrastructure.
The 2003 Iraq War was sold on weapons of mass destruction that did not exist. It destroyed Iraqi civil society, created the power vacuum that produced ISIS, and left the country’s oil infrastructure in the hands of international companies that had lobbied for the invasion.
The pattern is not subtle. Every American military intervention in the Persian Gulf has been, at its structural core, about who controls the oil. It has been about Israel manipulating the United States into acting as the country’s personal bully. The human cost has been paid by people who did not make the decisions and do not receive the benefits.
The 2026 Iran war is the same pattern with updated technology and a president who tweets about it at 5 AM. Covfefe!
The Deal Trump Won’t Take
Iran’s offer is on the table. It is, by any reasonable measure, a face-saving off-ramp. The nuclear question gets deferred, not abandoned. The strait reopens. The food emergency eases. The oil price drops. Trump can claim he ended the war.
He won’t take it because taking it means admitting the war didn’t work. And admitting the war didn’t work means admitting that the people who told him it would work — Netanyahu, the neoconservative architecture of advisers who have wanted this war for thirty years, the fossil fuel interests that benefit from Persian Gulf instability — were wrong. Or were not wrong about what the war would accomplish for them, and simply did not tell him what that was.
Rubio said it on Fox: we can’t let them get away with it.
The people who will not eat because of this decision — they are letting someone get away with something too. They just don’t have a Fox News segment to say so.
The record should show that someone noticed.
Penfist is a combat veteran who served with the Army National Guard in Iraq and Afghanistan, a Marine-trained combat correspondent (MOS 4341), and the author of Dispatches from a Dying Empire at dyingempire.org. He grew up in Bangladesh and Haiti, was raised by Mennonite and Amish parents, and is a naturalized U.S. citizen.
I'm not convinced that Trump won't accept the offer.
He, the GOP, right-wing pundits, and legacy media will spin it as a "win".
Trump wants the war to end...the question is what the Gulf states and Israel want.
Getting caught up on my reading. I subscribe to too much well written material. It's ridiculous that I am commenting so many days after you published. But please know that I always consider your dispatches to be excellent. And your values spot on.
When governments make food availability a last consideration, they don't deserve to govern. In fact, their leaders belong on trial at the International Criminal Court.