This post is opinion only. See full disclaimer below
I have a friend who is one of the smartest guys I know on realpolitik whose ideas sometimes I pass along here because they are always in the very least interesting. But you are forewarned: sometimes he’s way ahead of the curve and other times he is completely and totally wrong. His track record is mixed at best. In an earlier post quite a while ago I mentioned his idea that Trump might be trying to do with the Iran war what the U.S. did to Russia in the 80s—but in this case instead of hurting the Soviet Union by crashing the oil price, crushing China’s economy by spiking the oil price. That idea while certainly interesting turned out to be wrong. So here is his new point, though I’m not at all sure I agree with it. I can think of a lot of counterfactuals, but it’s still conceptually worth considering and if nothing else raises key issues.
My friend argues that the entire U.S. approach to managing the Middle East right now fundamentally misunderstands the concept of power versus money which animates the region. This is something I have myself discussed in earlier posts and agree with him about. Trump and his team think entirely in terms of money or more broadly economics, real estate balance sheets, and transactional leverage, failing to understand that for many key actors there, money is meaningless and power is everything. They think that ultimately given the right incentives everyone has, so to speak, a price. By treating statecraft like a corporate negotiation, the administration assumes that escalating economic costs can contain hardened enemies of the United States.
He contends, however, and this is his unique point, that this mismatch is setting up a catastrophic collision. When Washington abruptly shifts posture or tries to freeze military campaigns to chase fragile diplomatic frameworks based on this illusory economic perspective, it isolates key allies like Israel and shatters traditional strategic predictability. Rather than accepting the strategic framework of such corporate-style diplomacy, a battle-tested leadership like that of Israel facing existential threats will bypass the White House entirely and take unilateral kinetic action to secure its borders.
Furthermore, my friend points out that even if Israel transitions leadership in its upcoming October elections—with figures from the military establishment like Gadi Eisenkot surging in the polls—the security posture will only harden further. He suggests that a post-Netanyahu government rooted in the IDF high command would have even less patience for erratic American interference and transactional leadership, making a unilateral move to neutralize Iranian oil and further attacks on nuclear infrastructure virtually inevitable. This inevitability I find way too strong a stance, I can think of plenty of good reasons why it could be wrong, but he’s pretty adamant on this point so he certainly got my attention at least with this thesis.
To look at the broader geopolitical theater, my friend highlighted to me in our conversation the administration’s recent jarring strategic pivot away from traditional security arrangements with Israel toward allies Trump finds more economically useful to his style of leadership. This transactional realignment features massive commercial packages and defense carrots dangled before regional heavyweights like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey—including pushing multi-billion dollar civil nuclear frameworks, lifting CAATSA sanctions, and floating advanced F-35 fighter jet sales. Now I can see plenty of reasons why Trump might correctly pursue some of these courses in an effort to create a stable and peaceful Middle East and even indirectly strengthen Israeli security in the region through new agreements and Saudi Arabia is of course a long time US ally, but he’s not wrong that these are in some cases major shifts and some of these things Israel may feel challenge its security interests.
He points out that all this culminated, if the media reports are accurate, in a U.S. president abruptly calling off an imminent joint military strike with Israel against Iran via a sudden very public social media post. I also found this event if correct absurd. While trying a last ditch effort to secure a peace deal can be viewed different ways, changing a strike decision over a public platform when such an action should be the most closely guarded, highly coordinated act of statecraft—leaving key allies like Israel completely in the dark until they supposedly, if these accounts are correct, read a tweet—highlights a commercial playbook that treats national security like a branding exercise, causing a partial collapse of Western deterrence.
Figures like Jared Kushner and special envoy Steve Witkoff are, my friend argues, undeniably talented in high-stakes corporate negotiation and real estate development, but trying to manage multi-front warfare and difficult nuclear deals with people with this career experience my friend says is, and this is his analogy not mine, a little like a prep school kid wandering into the South Bronx of an earlier very dangerous era at 2 AM—completely oblivious to the rules of a world where hostile players don’t care about your balance sheet. I think this is too harsh. After all both Kushner and Witkoff have actually achieved some major diplomatic breakthroughs, but this is it’s true a very different rougher space than they are used to, so my friend does have a point, at least to a degree.
Trump’s worldview was forged in the hyper-commercial, high-stakes arena of New York real estate and reality television—a world where every relationship is a negotiable contract, leverage is financial, and walking away from a deal or rebranding a failure is always an option. Netanyahu, by contrast, was shaped by the brutal crucible of Israel’s elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit, the loss of his brother Yoni at Entebbe, and a lifelong immersion in a state mindset where miscalculation means physical extinction, not Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Because Trump seems to sometimes treat Netanyahu like a difficult developer partner across a boardroom table rather than an uncompromising veteran fighting a literal survival war, he fundamentally,, my friend argues, has a tendency to misread him. This profound disconnect is precisely why unilateral action is, he argued with me, baked into the cake: a leader whose worldview is built on balance sheets cannot comprehend a player for whom physical survival overrides all economic logic, making a unilateral Israeli strike all but certain when Washington tries to trade away their security for a quick public deal. Here I think my friend ignores all Trump has been through in his presidency which must have hardened him considerably and the fact that Netanyahu has spent years in delicate diplomatic dances, but there are obvious differences between them that do indeed matter and could lead to such unilateral and unexpected action.
When that collision finally occurs, my friend notes that a unilateral Israeli strike breaking the board apart centers on the most obvious, high-leverage move available: systematically dismantling Iran’s critical oil and energy architecture. Through bypassing Washington’s eleventh-hour diplomatic freezes and striking Iran’s upstream production locations and export facilities, Israel can unilaterally alter the strategic calculus, deeply hurt Iran’s wartime leverage, along with instantly forcing a severe energy shock across global markets that changes the likely international response to securing the region. Because this kinetic option cuts straight through the administration’s transactional illusions, the resulting market dislocation and geopolitical fallout would completely shatter the White House’s “real estate” transactional playbook, ultimately forcing the United States into only one possible path forward: a direct, full-scale preemption of Iran to salvage what remains of American credibility. Now, again, I’m not at all sure such a path is inevitable, but if you are in markets and do not add this possible unilateral action to your macro understanding as a possibility, you are probably missing a key variable that has the potential to effect in an incredibly major way the broader strategic picture.
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