A ragtag group of rebels in flip-flops facing down the fearsomely militarized outpost of a vast homicidal Empire. Doing it for years. Tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of the rebels’ children either slaughtered or dead from starvation. The rebels defeat the militarized, imperial Petro-kingdom outpost. The rebels defeat the Empire. They turn their gaze to the horrific, bloody genocide in Gaza. They coordinate with heroically besieged and defiant Iran, which has already turned off the Hormuz spigot to 20 percent of the world’s oil. The rebels seize islands in the Red Sea. Their Iraqi allies bomb the Saudi pipeline. No more oil through Bab al-Mandeb. The rebels and the Iranians now have their hands on a good chunk of the West’s economy. They demand the Empire leave their neighborhood. They demand Israel leave Lebanon and Gaza. Then they cut a deal whereby they will only interdict Saudi oil; but ultimately, they may succeed where no one ever has before, and that means Gaza and Lebanon. These are the Houthis.
Ansar Allah (the Houthis) and their allies in Iran aren’t kidding around: they’ve lost too many people to U.S. and Israeli barbarity for that. Indeed, on September 17, Tehran announced Hormuz would remain closed until Trump and Netanyahu leave office. Twenty percent of the world’s oil previously transited Hormuz. Forty percent of Saudi oil passed through the Red Sea. Now it’s much less, so Iran’s announcement makes crystal clear to the Israeli and American electorate who caused high prices – with diesel fuel at one point reportedly near $10 a gallon in California, the cost of shipping just about everything skyrocketed. That price gets passed on to the consumer, who can thank the ignominious gang that can’t shoot straight, namely the decrepit Trump/Netanyahu duo.
To make matters worse, “With Mideast on fire, oil prices are poised to explode,” announced a Responsible Statecraft headline September 17. The article focuses on how damage to a critical Saudi pipeline will delay shipments to Europe, which is paying through the nose for the Trump/Netanyahu stupidity. “Compounding the perils of transit [of Saudi oil from the Iraqi-bombed pipeline], Houthi rebels have taken control of the port of Mokha in Yemen and offshore islands in the Bab al-Mandeb, giving them a platform to harass shipping in the Red Sea.” These developments have pushed “oil prices back most of the way toward the highs reached at the outbreak of the war more than six months ago…seaborn refined product exports from Russia and the Middle East had fallen from roughly 8 million to 4 million barrels daily since February 2026 [due to the genius CIA strategy of directing Kiev’s assaults on Moscow’s energy sector. We westerners are ruled by morons.].”
Indeed, Moscow has barred all energy exports due to CIA-directed Ukrainian assaults on its refineries. This screws Europe. No matter that, that may not be the Kremlin’s intention – after all, with less oil, they need it for themselves. So Europe gets no more oil from Russia, no more from Saudi Arabia, which announced it would be unable to provide it on September 18. Adding insult to injury, the U.S., another big oil producer, has become chary of exporting oil, because its strategic petroleum reserve has slumped to roughly 40 percent of capacity. What it does export will cost more. Europe is cut off. Deindustrialization, already boosted by the idiotic NATO proxy war on Russia, will zoom ahead. More companies will relocate out of Germany and France. This is the U.S. sinking a knife in the back of its chief ally, the EU.
Do EU bigwigs even notice this betrayal? Well might you ask. Ever since Joe “Proxy War” Biden bombed Nordstream, the Eurocrats have turned a blind eye to either treacherous or unspeakably birdbrain U.S. policy. If, as the aphorism goes, there comes a point where stupidity becomes indistinguishable from malice, Washington passed it vis-à-vis Europe sometime during the Biden regime, with its preposterous lies re and provocation of Moscow. Donald “Blockade Everybody” Trump has done worse than nothing to correct this spiraling catastrophe.
As a result, the far right wins European elections, catapulted to power by rising prices and vanishing jobs, while the only hope for sanity and justice, in parties like La France Insoumise headed by Old Leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and BSW, headed by socialist Sahra Wagenknecht, continue to be denigrated by the nitwit corporate American media. Why? Well, you can only conclude that the American security state, which long ago decided the sole way to keep its hands on power was to win the propaganda war in the U.S. corporate press and that that war is truly the only one that counts, has decided fascist-adjacent European parties serve its interests better than anything on the left. The security state, headquartered in Washington, D.C., simply couldn’t care less about Europe’s lurch to the reactionary right, so long as it maintains its death grip on the New York Times, the Washington Post, and now, AI.
Meanwhile, per RT (Russian state news has not yet been captured by U.S. state news), “oil prices spiked to $109 per barrel,” as the drone-blasted Saudi pipeline is and will remain dysfunctional for the foreseeable future. That pipeline, stretching 1200 kilometers across the country to the Red Sea port of Yanbu, was critical for the Saudis. “The Gulf kingdom blamed Iranian-backed militias in Iraq for the attack…Iraqi fighters targeted the pipeline in solidarity with Yemen’s Houthis.” In short, Tehran’s goal of driving the U.S. out of West Asia proceeds apace, abetted by Donald “Act First, Think Later” Trump’s moronic assault on Iran, which now has the Persians mad as hornets and, having obliterated most U.S. military bases in the Gulf, moved on to their version of the nuclear option (which is, in fact, more effective than nukes), namely, taking western economies hostage until western rulers come to their senses.
They will not. The era of Western rulers coming to their senses ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union, which caused nearly all Western honchos’ heads to swell to prodigious size – permanently. No matter how hard reality gobsmacks them in their stupendously swollen faces, these balloon brains continue with their air-headed delusion that we live in the unipolar moment and the U.S. rules the world. Nothing can shake this psychotic idee fixe. It is a gargantuan hallucination immune to the reality that U.S. defense production is hostage to Beijing, with its corner on the market of essential rare earths, that American interceptor missiles have almost run out and cannot be replaced for years to defend U.S. attack dog Israel, that U.S. foreign military bases are largely indefensible, that aircraft carriers are obsolete, that the multipolar (Russia/China/Iran) alliance boasts the best air defense in the world (Russia), more nukes than anybody (again Russia) and a government-supported defense production sector that runs 24/7 (all three) producing hypersonic weapons the pentagon can only dream about, that overthrowing the pro-Russian government in Kiev in 2014 in a neo-Nazi, CIA-backed putsch was an act of such titanic hubris that it left U.S. rulers so retarded that even after Moscow has annihilated three NATO-constituted iterations of a Ukrainian military and killed over two million Ukrainian soldiers – so retarded that they are not, like anyone with even a very little brain in their skull, running for the exits of the Ukraine war.
Faced with such a Western arrogance, so monstrous and blinding that it merges into outright imbecility, I predict that in a very short while, Ansar Allah, Iran, Iranian proxies in Iraq, and, who knows, Turkey(?) will be running the show in West Asia, while the dimwits in Washington and Jerusalem pat themselves on the back for winning the hasbara wars. This is the Cold War legacy, when the West’s best and brightest in government spots like the CIA co-opted the arts, the press, the universities to face down the commies. Well, the commies are gone, but the arts, media, and academies are mere shells, hollowed out by state security parasites for purposes long forgotten that have simply morphed into lust for money and power.
The result? A mass Western hebetude at the top that only very stubborn, cantankerous, tenacious, intelligent, and exceptional people can shrug off. None of those people wield power. So we are, in a word, sunk.
