The TACO is back...

Yesterday was a bit wild, even for the Tangerine Tyrant (TT). Early in the morning, he sent a bleat that strongly hinted that he's done and dusted with this whole war:

Once the market realized that Trump is telegraphing that he will cut and run and leave the mess for others to clean up, it soared like an eagle. As Paul Krugman lead with this morning:

The stock market has soared on the news of potential U.S surrender, which tells you something about how the war is going. Unfortunately, declaring victory and running away will be a lot more difficult than Trump thinks. For one thing, thousands of U.S. ground troops are on their way to the Persian Gulf, and it will be very hard to avoid succumbing to the temptation to use them, at which point we will have entered what Robert Pape calls the “escalation trap.” (emphasis mine)

And indeed, the stock market rejoiced:

But, the consequences will be felt for a long time, in fact, we are just seeing the leading edge of the true repurcussions of this war. The tankers and cargo ships that transited the Strait of Hormuz on the eve of this misguided adventure are getting to their destination ports, and after that, the true dearth of supplies will commence. Already, in places where there is a lack of local refining (cough, Australia, cough) they are being squeezed hard by the leading edge of this tsunami of shit:

A 79 year old spray-tanned former reality TV host from Queens, a bloke who has gone bankrupt 6 times, who once tried to sell steaks through a catalogue, who genuinely believes windmills cause cancer, looked at 50 years of extraordinarily fragile global energy architecture, architecture that took decades and trillions of dollars and multiple wars to construct, and decided the best thing to do with it was blow it up.

Not metaphorically. Actually blow it up.

And in doing so, Donald J. Trump has achieved something that OPEC, the Soviet Union, the 1973 oil embargo, the Gulf War, the Iraq War, the Global Financial Crisis and a global pandemic all failed to achieve. He has ended the era of cheap oil. Permanently. Irreversibly. Comprehensively.

Congratulations Donald. Truly historic stuff. They’ll be teaching this in economics faculties for a hundred years. Probably not in the way you’d prefer, but still.

The cheap energy world is over. Done. Finished. Whatever you paid for fuel last year, frame that receipt and hang it above the fireplace, because your grandchildren are going to look at it the way we look at photos of 20 cent meat pies. With a kind of hollow, grief-stricken disbelief that anything could ever have been that good.

And Australia, blessed abundant resource-rich sitting-on-an-ocean-of-gas Australia, is about to find out what happens when you spend 20 years dismantling your energy security infrastructure and replacing it with a vibes-based transition plan and some optimistic projections about Chinese EV imports.

This is from "I Fucking Love Australia", and I can assure you I fucking love their stack! But they are correct. We have lived through an era of dirt cheap energy, 40+ years of remarkably low priced energy that drove amazing growth throughout both the developed and developing world. All based on the Petrodollar system, and remarkably low levels of turmoil.

That is, until the US and Israel decided to go hard at Iran. Their calculation that Iran would fall fast, and that the retrogressive hard line Islamic Republic government would fall was pure fantasy. In actuality, the war has hardened the grip on the country (even though control comms have been disrupted, it is clear that there is no populist uprising to replace them, and in fact the fighting has reinforced the US's role as the "Great Satan". Way to win Trump!)

Let's also recognize that Trump cutting and running, leaves the status quo, that is Iran as effectively controlling the flow of goods through the Strait of Hormuz. And Trump is going to take his toys and go home...

But what has become obvious is that Trump is now bored with Iran. He clearly expected this be as quick and easy as the snatch-n-run that he did in Venezuela in early January, and his reported 2-minute sizzle reel (oops, I meant his video PDB that is essentially war-porn) is convincing him that we are DOMINATING™ those filthy Iranians, and lil' Marco's erection to go and topple Cuba is now in the danger area of the warnings on the Cialis ads on the overnight binge TV informercials that Trump has on whilst bleating to his private Social Media site.

He knows that if he says it, that the war is over, his will is enough to make it so.

And the financial markets were primed to reward this.

And then, yesterday, after a G7 security meeting, Lil' Marco stood on the tarmac and said to the gaggle that the US might leave NATO.

Are you fucking kidding me? You really think that is a threat? After all this shit?

Again, from IFLOZ:

Every leader in Europe just read that headline and you know what they did? They didn’t panic. They group-texted each other and said, “So, we doing this without them or what?” Because that’s where we’re at. The contingency plan isn’t “keep America happy.” The contingency plan is “work around the toddler until the adults get the house back.”

NATO without America is still 30 countries with functioning democracies, universal healthcare, and leaders who can drink water with one hand. They’ll be fine. Will it be harder? Yeah. Will it be quieter? Fucking oath it will.

Meanwhile, Trump’s sitting there thinking this is leverage. Thinking the world is trembling. Mate, the world is laughing. Not the nervous kind of laughing. The kind where you’ve genuinely stopped caring and you’re just watching the show because the ticket’s already paid for and there’s nothing good on the other channel.

Look, they get it, we're going to leave. You've been telegraphing this for like a fucking decade, so just do it.

Leave NATO and be done with it.

Then there's Lucian Truscott's great missive from the last day of March, where he contrasted Trump's declaration that we've won, with the clear evidence that Iran is not yet done. In fact, just yesterday, one of the Shahed drones hit a Kuwaiti tanker. Oops, once again, a ~$30K drone, built from off the shelf electronics, and using the GPS sytem was able to strike a ship loaded with $200M work of oil.

Or:

The Kuwaiti tanker was not the only vessel targeted by Iranian weapons today. A Greek container ship was narrowly missed by two drones off the coast of Saudi Arabia, and a Thai cargo ship was hit by a drone just outside of the Strait.

In the United Arab Emirates, eight ballistic missiles, four cruise missiles, and 36 drones launched from Iran were intercepted on Tuesday. Saudi Arabian air defenses shot down eight ballistic missiles and eight drones that originated in Iran. The airport in Erbil, in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, was hit by several missiles or drones fired by Iran.

So, that’s what’s happening in and around the Strait of Hormuz right now.

On Truth Social this morning, Trump was up to his customary threats against NATO allies. He wrote, referring to the Strait of Hormuz, “You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself. Go get your own oil!”

And then there's this WTaF:

By this afternoon, he was yapping incoherently about how and why and when the war might end. “We will be leaving very soon, within ​two weeks, maybe two weeks, maybe ⁠three.” Asked by reporters what might bring about such an end to the war, Trump explained, with his usual precision, “When we feel that they are, for a long period of time, put into the stone ages and will not come up with a nuclear weapon, then we will leave whether we have a deal or not.”

The "Art" of the deal, eh?

So much winning. I am not tired of this winning, but it is clear that Trump is tired of it, and wants to move on to his ballroom that makes no sense, with a grand staircase that doesn't lead to an entry, a side entry way that makes no sense, and columns that block views... (The Upshot in the NY times - gift link)

And lil' Marco wants to get to his real project, restoring Cuba to its pre-Castro, 'Batista' glory.