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Well, folks, we have just 24 hours left with Donald Trump's new ultimatum against Iran. This isn't not good and this is definitely an escalation. And keep in mind, just last week Donald Trump told us that he would secure the Strait of Hormuz and that we, the United States of America, would get it, quote, open, safe, and free.
And that our allies should help us. Then the next day he said, "Well, it'd be nice if other countries would help police us. And then the very next day he said, 'You know what? We don't need their help anyway. We'll we'll secure the Strait of Hormuz ourselves.' And then, of course, people got excited again that, all right, so we we are going to secure the the the Strait of Hormuz.
Is that why we're sending troops? Trump then says, 'I'm not putting troops anywhere. No.' Very next day sends more Marines and amphibious ships in that direction. And then, after that announcement of more Marines heading in that direction on Friday, Donald Trump sees the market sell off and says, "You know what?
The war is actually winding down. I I don't want to do a ceasefire, but, quote, we are getting very close to meeting our objectives as we consider winding down our great military efforts." Well, then, later that same day, Friday evening, after all this flip-flopping of we're going to take care of the Strait of Hormuz, let's do it with our allies, just kidding, we don't need our allies, we never needed them, we could do it alone, after all this, and then the war is winding down, Donald Trump now flip-flops on the Strait of Hormuz and says, "You know, the Hormuz Strait will have to be guarded and policed as necessary by other nations who use it.
The United States doesn't use it. If asked, we will help those countries, but it shouldn't be necessary once the Iranian threat is eradicated anyway." So, in other words, on one hand, we're going to secure the Strait of Hormuz ourselves, but our allies should help us. Just kidding, we don't need our allies.
Just kidding, we're not going to secure the Strait of Hormuz at all. Which is exactly the same pattern as the flip-flop that we just got with the 24-hour deadline. See, Friday evening after the market sold off and then the post market, you know, regained on these Trump comments, Trump is like, "Ah, you know, the war is winding down.
We're almost done." Saturday, Donald Trump issues a 48-hour deadline, which which ends Monday morning, hence there are only about 24 hours left. And this deadline is a 48-hour deadline, again ending Monday morning, for Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz, or else the United States will start destroying power plants.
Which is literally the infrastructure that Iran says, "If you attack, then we will attack your infrastructure." Now, Donald Trump's actual words here were, quote, "If Iran doesn't fully open without threat the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours from this exact point, the United States will hit and obliterate the various power plants, starting with the biggest one first." "Immediately after targeting of power plants and infrastructure, vital infrastructure, energy, and oil facilities across the region will all be considered legitimate targets and will be destroyed irreversibly, and oil prices will rise for a long time." That was Donald Trump's commentary.
Donald Trump himself recognizing that if he strikes this infrastructure, oil prices will rise for a long time. This is literally not only now a reversal on the Strait of Hormuz, we're going to secure it. Just kidding, we're not going to do anything about it. Maybe we'll consider helping. Two, the war is winding down.
Just kidding, you have 48 hours. Now, 24 hours left for us to basically Operation Desert Storm your arse. See the reason there's a reference to Operation Desert Storm is US the United States and allies in 1991 carried out hundreds of strikes against Iraq's oil and electrical systems in 1991 and they purposely narrowed their targets to switching terminals rather than the generator stations.
Think about it kind of like cutting the power lines which are a little easier to kind of sew back together. It's not really sewing but you know what I mean. Whereas generators can take years to rebuild. Now some of those strikes ended up obviously leading to collateral damage such as damaged water cleaning infrastructure potentially raising infant mortal infant mortality.
So there a lot of downsides that come with war. These are called externalities. They're they're bad. But Donald Trump here literally went from we're winding down to now we're actually going to step [snorts] up our attacks within 24 hours. And Iran then responded just this morning and said, "Okay. I guess the Strait of Hormuz will be completely closed if you target Iranian energy.
In fact, this shows Donald Trump is a desperate and that his threats this is a quote threats and terror only strengthen our Iranian unity. The Strait of Hormuz is open to all except those who violate our soil so basically only India and maybe China and we firmly confront delirious threats on the battlefield." Now, you have to also remember that it's not that hard to attach some C4 onto the bottom of a cargo ship that's passing the Strait of Hormuz.
You can literally do this with divers or small little speedboats. And these divers and small speedboats they hang out in the civilian ports off the coast of Iran so it's really hard to tell the difference between a military small speed craft of divers who are you know planting C4 or small-scale uh Iranian naval mines or even larger-scale mines, which already may be there for, you know, what that's worth.
Uh the United States did decommission its original four mine sweepers, its ships. Uh this was a long time ago. We we do have some multi-purpose ships that can handle mine sweeping sweeping operations, but we did sort of get rid of our mine sweepers. Anyway, uh Iran here is making it very clear that they're not [clears throat] giving up.
And they say that the strait will only reopen after the United States goes in and rebuilds the very power plants that they end up destroying. The IRGC also says that power plants, energy infrastructure, and IT, so think data centers or whatever, in Israel will be widely targeted as well as those amongst allies in the region, to which of course the UAE says, "Yo, come on, man.
The more you attack us, the more we're just going to be friends with the United States." Which just pisses Iran off even more. Iran says, quote, "We did not start the war and we will not start it now, but if the enemy harms our power plants, we will do everything to defend the country and the interests of our people." This is leading Gulf Arab countries to warn the administration to please not damage oil and water facilities in the region because you're just going to end up endangering the entire world.
Now, Saudi Arabia feels pretty comfortable because lately what they've been doing, I mean, I shouldn't say they feel pretty comfortable, but one way that they've been able to hedge is they can pipe oil from the Gulf to the Red Sea, and I want you to see that here. So, Saudi Arabia can literally pump oil from the Gulf over here.
Kharg Island would be up here. The Strait of Hormuz is over here. UAE, Qatar, Oman, a little bit of Oman over there by the strait. Uh anyway, they're thinking, "Well, we'll just pump the oil over here to through our East-West pipeline over to the Red Sea and then come out over here through the Bob al-Mandab Strait over here, which is kind of like the Strait of Hormuz.
It's also very tight. Well, this is exactly what the Houthis like attacking. Now, the Houthis actually have a deal that they created in 2022 with Saudi Arabia not to attack Saudi Arabian ships. However, senior Houthi officials recently said that their fingers are on the trigger, and it's only a matter of time.
In other words, their stepping up rhetoric suggesting that they might end up attacking ships in the Red Sea, which would mean not only do we end up getting stuck with a snarled Strait of Hormuz, but potentially also shipping lanes through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal end up getting damaged or blockaded, if you will.
This implies more escalation, not de-escalation. At the same time, Israel is attacking Lebanon with such veracity that they're trying to target Hezbollah targets, but there are now fears that because Israel is bombing bridges in Lebanon, which is just north of Israel, that the IDF is potentially considering invading the southern portion of the country.
And that's why they're potentially targeting bridges, infrastructure, and whatever they can to end up controlling this southern region of Lebanon here. So, here's Lebanon. There you go. Here's that outline of Lebanon. And the southern region could end up being considered some form of a buffer zone or whatever.
And so, people are worried that basically Israel is going to pull a Gaza Strip, which is here to the south and the west of Israel and they're going to pull that off on the southern portion of Lebanon, which obviously escalates the broader instability in the region and potentially generates more terror cells to launch more attacks against Israel and this disaster just keeps going.
Now, 22 nations have signed a call for Iran to stop attempts to block traffic in the Strait of Hormuz. Uh, NATO's uh, general secretary and others suggest this is a sign that maybe these countries are actually going to do something to secure the Strait of Hormuz. These are countries like South Korea, the UAE, Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, and so on and so forth.
Uh, and NATO's secretary general says, you know, it's going to take weeks to get some ships out here. This is creating some hopium, but there's also no clear sign that any of these countries have done anything other than sign a letter condemning the Iranian closure of the strait. And in my opinion, there's a really big difference between signing a letter condemning Iran closing the strait and actually doing something about it.
Now, the other issue that we have is that Iran just launched two long-range missiles from Iran to Diego Garcia. Uh, that's an island where we typically keep some of our uh, B-2 bombers, our stealth bombers. And they were previously deemed to be outside of the range uh, of Iran's weapons capabilities.
Uh, however, now it appears that Iran's {quote} {unquote} space program that they've been trying to operate may have just secretly been an opportunity for them to develop long-range missiles. As you zoom in here, you can see uh, what look like uh, some of uh, these US assets. This is, you know, obviously a dated image here from Google, but uh, a lot of people believe that these hangars right here with these large doors here house our B-2 bombers.
And there's this suspicion that uh, Iran was attempting to target uh, this island specifically. And obviously uh that has now led to concerns that well, if Iran can launch a missile from here to here, uh which is I mean, let's let's map this here. Let's see here. Measure distance. See, did you know that you could just right click and kind of see?
Yeah, look at that. That's about 4,000 km, right? Well, that has led people to wonder, well, wait a second. If y'all can do 4,000 km to Diego Garcia, what does 4,000 km look if we take this other end of the line? Oh, I guess I can't do that. Clear measurement. We'll just do it again over here. Uh we'll take uh we'll consider a launch site from over here, and then we'll go over to let's say Germany.
4,000 km would actually go out to over here. I mean, you could hit Paris, Germany, potentially the United Kingdom, uh certainly all of Italy, all of Greece, maybe even the edge of Spain over here, Poland, Norway, uh Sweden. They're all within 4,000 km of that northwestern region of Iran. So, uh the United Kingdom has since come out and said, "No, no, no, no, we we are safe.
We're safe from missiles." I don't know why they sound a little Trump-y in there. And then Michael Waltz, the US Ambassador to the United Nations, has said that, "Well, it looks like the Iranians have some ability that we didn't know about to send longer range ballistic missiles." And this all has to do with their uh re-entry capabilities that they've been apparently developing in their space program.
So, none of this is good. All of this is, in my opinion, escalatory, and a lot of it starts with Donald Trump's 48-hour threat. I know I hate to say that because obviously, you know, we're not trying to imply that these conflicts that have been going on for 70-plus years or I mean, some would say thousands of years uh in in the Middle East are all because of Donald Trump's 48-hour threat, but this is more to say, you know, Friday afternoon we're like, "Oh, okay, cool.
Maybe there's an off-ramp here." And then like literally 24 hours later we're like, "Oh, 48-hour threat and you're going to start bombing energy infrastructure." I mean, my hope is that Scott Bessent is right and this is just an escalate to de-escalate, but I don't know that that works with the Iranians. Stay safe out there, folk.
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