This timeline sucks. Brent crude is at a 53-week high of $119 USD a barrel. The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed. Gulf infrastructure is absorbing Iranian drone swarms faster than Lockheed Martin can manufacture interceptors. Saudi Arabia — the kingdom that controls 12% of the world’s oil — is signing defense pacts with Ukraine while its oil fields burn. The Houthis have entered the war and are threatening to close the Bab el-Mandeb. North Korea is quiet in the way that precedes being loud. For what? All of this was avoidable but for one fragile idiot’s ego. Historians will marvel.
This is what empire looks like when it stops being managed and starts being performed.
The United States has been the planet’s most consequential ecological actor for a century. Not because Americans are uniquely evil — because the American economic model,…
