Yesterday I received what may well have been my last inquiry from a prospective buyer for "Riverbend". I didn't take long to reply, "Aren't you overly optimistic? We may all be dead before you had a chance to inspect the property."
Since then, we haven't heard any more from that psychopath inside the White House after his last threat that Iran's 'civilisation will die'. While he runts and raves and plays high-stakes poker, the Iranians are playing an old Persian game that requires more brain: chess. Shah mate, Trump!
Beyond the idiotic rhetorics of this mad president, let me remind you that EVERY administration, from Carter, Reagan, Bush (senior), Clinton, Bush (junior), Obama, to Biden, and Trump, said that a nuclear-armed Iran is unacceptable. So why did it take until now? Because Iran kept moving the goalposts, and the world kept letting them. By May 2025, the IAEA reported that Iran’s cache of near-weapons-grade enriched uranium had surged by 50 percent in just three months, putting Tehran one step away from having enough material for ten nuclear weapons.
China, the other superpower, is not an innocent bystander in this story — but then they may have kept in mind the famous quote attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, "Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake". Iran is central to Beijing’s entire overland trade and energy strategy. Iran sits at the heart of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the infrastructure network connecting East Asia to Europe through land-based transport and Persian Gulf energy routes. Without stable access through Iranian territory, Beijing’s supply chains have no alternative. Iran exported more than 520 million barrels of crude oil to China in 2025 alone. China buys over 80 percent of Iran’s oil. This isn’t ideological solidarity. It’s a dependency that neither side wants disrupted.
Which brings us to the Strait of Hormuz. Roughly 13 million barrels of oil per day moved through the Strait in 2025, about 31 percent of all seaborne crude in the world. About 45 percent of China’s oil imports pass through it. Iran has threatened to close it. And here’s what that threat actually produced: China is now in direct talks with Iran, pressing Tehran to allow crude oil and LNG vessels safe passage.
The United States didn’t stumble into this war because Israel asked nicely. It acted on a threat that five decades of American presidents had kicked down the road. The world needed someone to act. The better question isn’t why it happened. It’s why it took this long. Of course, less hyperbole from a mad president would've been far more effective.
If the ballon goes up in the next hour-and-a-half and we'll all be blown to smithereens, I console myself with having saved a lot of money on my ever-increasing medical bills. As for the inspection on Saturday, 11 April, I think it'll be a no-show. Tick tick tick ...
The clock just stopped, as Trump gave himself a two-week deadline to come up with a new distraction from the Epstein files, whith the Irians saying that "our hands are on the trigger, and as soon as the slightest mistake by the enemy is made, it will be responded to with full force."
