March 14, 2026 The Definitive Verdict On Trump’s Iran War Luke Ford No sacred cows.

The Definitive Verdict On Trump’s Iran War

Posted on March 14, 2026 by Luke Ford

The conflict is fifteen days old. The definitive verdicts are already everywhere.
That speed is not accidental, and it is not simply a product of media incentives, though those matter. The deeper engine is coalition logic. Each alliance in the Washington foreign policy ecosystem needs an early narrative because early narratives shape what counts as evidence later. A coalition that waits for the facts to settle has already lost the framing competition to the one that moved first.
The restraint coalition uses early failure declarations as an anchoring tactic. By comparing Operation Epic Fury to the 2003 Iraq invasion within the first two weeks, Stimson-adjacent analysts set the interpretive frame before any serious assessment is possible. The anchor matters because it raises the price of victory to a level that looks politically unaffordable. Once the quagmire frame takes hold, tactical successes get absorbed into it rather than challenging it. CENTCOM reporting 90 percent degradation of Iranian missile sites does not refute the failure narrative inside that frame. It becomes evidence of “tactical success masking strategic incoherence,” which is a way of saying the coalition’s preferred conclusion survives any incoming data. The diagnosis was never really a prediction. It was a pre-emptive defense of the diplomatic off-ramp as the only rational option.
The coercive pressure coalition runs the opposite play for the same structural reason. FDD-adjacent analysts frame the death of Ali Khamenei and the strikes on thousands of targets as a shattering of the regime’s myth of invincibility. That language does something specific. It creates sunk cost momentum. If the war is already a success on day fourteen, any pause for negotiation looks like surrendering a won position. The Oman mediation channel stops being diplomacy and starts being retreat. This framing protects the sanctions architects and regime-change specialists who would be sidelined if the conflict shifted back toward managed stalemate, because a stalemate resolved through diplomacy is a Stimson victory, not an FDD victory. The early success declaration keeps that outcome politically difficult.
RAND-type analysts play a different and in some ways more sophisticated game. They resist both verdicts and frame the situation as a fluid systems problem too complex for ideological certainty. The Iranian Artesh fracturing from the IRGC, the question of whether the regular army defects or holds, the second and third order effects of missile site degradation on Iran’s regional force projection, these are presented as emergent operational variables that require continuous expert analysis. The effect is to make the defense consultant permanently necessary. Declaring the war won or lost would allow the policymaker to stop the meter. Declaring it irreducibly complex keeps it running. This is not cynicism exactly. The complexity is real. But the professional incentive to emphasize that complexity over any cleaner narrative is also real, and the two reinforce each other in ways that are difficult to disentangle from inside the coalition.
The funding dimension runs underneath all of this and rarely gets named directly. Institutions whose donors watch oil prices and global market stability need the war to be an economic failure. At over a hundred dollars a barrel, that argument writes itself and it serves the financial coalition that funds governance-focused research. Institutions whose donors define success as a degraded Iranian axis of resistance need the war to be a strategic triumph. The correlation between funding sources and verdict speed is not coincidental. Nobody writes a check to an institution that keeps saying it is too early to tell. Uncertainty is professionally safe for the individual analyst but institutionally costly for the organization that depends on donors who want their worldview validated and amplified.
What all four moves share is that the confident expert is not primarily describing the war. Each declaration, whether failure, triumph, or complex system, defends the professional and financial architecture that makes that expert’s particular form of knowledge valuable. The war becomes a surface, much like the dark vessel, onto which each coalition projects the version of events that keeps its members employed, funded, and invited to the next briefing.
The attention economy did not create coalition signaling, but it turbocharges it in ways that make the problem qualitatively different from earlier eras of foreign policy debate.
Walter Lippmann wrote about the manufacture of consent in the 1920s, and Hans Morgenthau complained about the distortion of foreign policy by domestic politics throughout the Cold War. The coalitions Pinsof describes have always existed. What changed is the reward structure for public argument. Before cable news and social media, a foreign policy analyst built reputation slowly, through journal articles, congressional testimony, and the gradual accumulation of credibility inside a small professional world. The audience was narrow. The feedback loop was slow. That environment still rewarded certainty, but it also rewarded a kind of sustained seriousness that took years to demonstrate.
The attention economy collapsed that timeline. The relevant audience is now enormous and the feedback is instantaneous. A sharp take on Twitter or a confident cable news appearance reaches more people in an hour than a journal article reaches in a decade. That shift did not just change how analysts communicate. It changed what kind of analyst thrives. The skills that generate attention, confidence, clarity, moral urgency, and a memorable villain, are not the same skills that produce accurate long-range strategic assessment. Hedged analysis is invisible in an attention economy. Confident wrongness is often more visible than cautious accuracy, because wrongness delivered with conviction still generates the engagement that the algorithm rewards.
This creates a selection effect over time. The analysts who rise to prominence in a high-attention environment are disproportionately the ones willing to make strong claims early. They get the cable bookings, the follower counts, and the institutional platforms. The ones who say it is too early to tell get filtered out of the conversation not because they are wrong but because uncertainty does not travel. The result is that the public-facing foreign policy debate gets populated by a particular personality type, one that happens to align perfectly with coalition signaling needs. A coalition needs members who will go on television and defend the frame. The attention economy produces exactly those people and rewards them for exactly that behavior.
The speed dimension matters as much as the scale. Social media moves crises through a news cycle in hours rather than days. By the time serious analysis might be possible, the narrative has already formed, spread, and hardened into a position that careers are now attached to. Walking back a strong early claim is professionally costly in a way it never used to be, because the original claim is archived, searchable, and can be surfaced by opponents at any moment. This makes the early framing competition even more consequential. Whoever plants the dominant narrative in the first forty-eight hours of a crisis has a structural advantage that compounds over time, because subsequent events get interpreted through the existing frame and reversing it requires the analyst to publicly contradict themselves in front of a large audience.
Platform logic deepens the problem further. Algorithms on Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook do not optimize for accuracy. They optimize for engagement, which means outrage, conflict, and tribal validation perform better than nuance. A Stimson-aligned analyst arguing for diplomatic off-ramps gets more traction if they frame FDD as reckless warmongers than if they simply make the technical case for escalation management. An FDD-aligned analyst arguing for maximum pressure gets more traction if they frame the restraint coalition as appeasers than if they engage seriously with the counterarguments. The algorithm does not care about the substance of the foreign policy debate. It cares about whether the content triggers a strong emotional response, and coalition conflict reliably does that.
What this means for the quality of public foreign policy debate is that the attention economy selects for the most aggressive version of each coalition’s worldview and amplifies it above the more careful voices within each camp. Every coalition contains people capable of genuine intellectual humility and serious engagement with opposing views. Those people tend to lose the attention competition to the ones who perform certainty most convincingly. The public then sees a debate that looks more polarized and more ideologically rigid than the actual range of views inside each professional network, because the moderating voices within each coalition get drowned out by the ones who learned to play the attention game.
The Iran war coverage in March 2026 runs exactly this pattern. The conflict is two weeks old. The situation remains genuinely uncertain across almost every relevant dimension, military, political, economic, and regional. But the public debate looks settled because the attention economy already processed it. The takes have been made, the sides have been chosen, and the analysts who said the situation was complex and uncertain are not the ones getting booked for the next segment.

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Why Doesn’t Self-Help Help?

Posted on March 14, 2026 by Luke Ford

Self-help sells because it promises something people desperately want: a shortcut to becoming a better version of themselves. The problem is that the very mechanism that makes self-help appealing also makes it ineffective. Reading a book about discipline feels productive. It triggers a mild sense of accomplishment without requiring any actual change. Psychologists call this “self-licensing,” where the act of engaging with improvement substitutes for improvement itself.
The deeper problem is that most self-help addresses behavior while ignoring the structures beneath behavior. Someone who procrastinates does not procrastinate because they lack a morning routine. They procrastinate because of anxiety, avoidance, or a fear of failure that no checklist touches. The book treats the symptom and calls it a cure.
There is also the question of what researchers call the “intention-action gap.” People who read self-help report feeling motivated, and that motivation typically lasts a few days or weeks before eroding back to baseline. Human beings are not primarily rational agents who change when presented with good information. They are creatures of habit, social pressure, and environment. A book cannot restructure your social world or your daily context, and those things drive behavior far more than insight does.
Self-help works best in narrow circumstances. When someone has a specific, practical skill to learn and the book provides clear instruction with feedback loops, it can work. Learning to cook, manage time with a concrete system, or understand a negotiation framework are cases where a book can add real value. It also helps when the reader already has momentum and needs framing or permission to keep going, not a fundamental transformation.
The audience for self-help skews heavily toward people in transition: young adults entering the workforce, people in career crises, those recovering from relationships or addiction. Research suggests the heaviest readers of self-help are not the most troubled people but rather the moderately ambitious and slightly anxious middle class. They read not out of desperation but out of a belief that optimization is always possible and always necessary. Ironically, chronic self-help readers often show less measurable growth than people who simply act, because reading becomes a substitute for action.
Self-help is not exclusively American, but America gave it its particular shape. The genre has deep roots in Protestant theology, especially Calvinist ideas about work, discipline, and visible signs of grace. Success became a moral category. Benjamin Franklin formalized this with his self-improvement lists and the idea that character was a project to be managed. By the 20th century, ministers like Norman Vincent Peale secularized this into a gospel of positive thinking that required no theology, only attitude. The American self-help tradition insists that failure is personal and improvement is individual, which conveniently ignores structural obstacles.
Other cultures have their own traditions. Japan has a long literature on self-cultivation rooted in Buddhism and Confucianism. European philosophical traditions from Stoicism to Montaigne to the German Bildung tradition all concern themselves with developing the self. But none of them quite match the American insistence that self-improvement is the primary moral obligation of a citizen, or that wealth and health and happiness follow predictably from the right habits. That particular combination of market optimism and Protestant moralism is distinctly American, and it is why the genre generates billions of dollars here while functioning more modestly elsewhere.
The most honest self-help books acknowledge their own limits. Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman is a useful recent example. It argues that productivity culture is a kind of denial about mortality and finite time, and that the goal of optimizing life is itself the trap. Books like that use the genre’s conventions to critique the genre’s premises. They tend to sell well among people who have already burned through the standard offerings and come away skeptical.

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How do the MSM know Trump doesn’t have a plan for the Strait of Hormuz?

Posted on March 13, 2026 by Luke Ford

They don’t know. They infer.
Most mainstream reporters covering the Strait of Hormuz question work from three signals.
The first is bureaucratic. In Washington reporting, journalists treat the visible behavior of institutions as a proxy for the existence of a plan. If the Pentagon, State Department, and National Security Council are publicly aligned, giving detailed briefings, and rolling out phased objectives, reporters assume a coherent strategy exists. If messaging is inconsistent or officials speak anonymously about confusion, reporters infer the opposite. When they say Trump “has no plan,” they usually mean the normal bureaucratic indicators of a plan are missing.
The second is historical. Trump’s first term created a template in the media ecosystem. His style relied heavily on improvisation, personal signaling, and tactical moves rather than the traditional process of publishing doctrine papers or coordinated interagency strategy. Because that pattern existed before, journalists use it as a baseline assumption. When new crises emerge, they start with the hypothesis that the same style still operates.
The third is coalition incentives inside media. Most national security reporters are plugged into the professional defense and diplomacy networks that value predictability, formal planning, and institutional continuity. Those networks include former officials, think tank analysts, and military officers who brief reporters. When those sources say privately that they are unsure what the White House intends to do, the resulting coverage frames the situation as “no strategy.”
This is where an Alliance Theory lens helps. From that perspective, the press does not verify whether a plan exists. It reports the perceptions of the coalition it relies on. If the national security bureaucracy feels excluded from the decision process, its members tell reporters there is no plan. The media publishes that judgment.
But a plan can exist in two different forms. One is the traditional bureaucratic plan: detailed phases, war games, interagency memos, congressional briefings. That is the model reporters expect. The other is what you might call a political signaling strategy, one built on ambiguity, personal deterrence, and shifting statements that keep adversaries uncertain. Trump has often favored this second style. If the strategy rests on controlled unpredictability, it will look exactly like chaos from the outside.
There is also a deeper structural reason the press defaults to skepticism. The Strait of Hormuz ranks among the most sensitive choke points in the global economy. Roughly a fifth of the world’s oil flows through it. Any credible U.S. strategy would involve classified naval deployment plans, contingency strikes against Iranian coastal batteries, coordination with Gulf states, and backchannel diplomacy with China and India to manage oil markets. Almost all of that would be secret.
Journalists are left with partial signals and elite gossip. They fill the gaps with interpretation. So when you read that Trump “has no plan,” translate it as something narrower. It usually means the reporters’ sources inside the national security establishment either do not see the plan or were not involved in making it.
Aaron MacLean writes:

If the commitment to clear the strait for traffic is made, doing so will be a two-phase operation. Whether or not the United States has made that decision, we are effectively already in the first phase. Before escort operations can begin, Iran’s stores of ship-killers need to be reduced to manageable numbers through an air campaign. The president has spoken repeatedly about going after mines and the boats that lay them, and this is a vital part of just such preparatory work. Add to that stockpiles of drones, drone boats, cruise missiles, the command and control facilities of the units that launch them, the personnel themselves, and so forth—all of these kinds of targets would need to be hit and hit again until they can no longer be useful to the fight….
If one were to attempt to sail through the strait right now, even under U.S. naval escort, the Iranians could potentially swarm convoys with enough projectiles that eventually something gets through—possibly even damaging the naval escorts themselves.
A failure like this could harm confidence in the operation, to say the least, and set everything back weeks. The Navy will want to be in a position where Iran’s capability to strike will be limited enough that our capacity to intercept will be able to handle the incoming…
Interception of incoming fire will be only part of the tactical puzzle. The hard military reality is that the ships under escort will effectively be bait as the U.S. Navy and the Iranians battle around them. Like a mother duck and her ducklings, naval escorts and commercial shipping will transit the strait under layers of air cover and persistent drone surveillance of the Iranian coast. When Iranian forces emerge to take a shot of any kind, our military will attempt to kill whoever is doing the shooting. And if present-day military technology expands the toolkit of Iran’s offensive assets, the ability to keep drone surveillance in the sky constantly, comprehensively, and at relatively low cost is a big advantage to the United States, unavailable during the days of Earnest Will.
It could be several weeks before escort operations begin in the Gulf, and then the operation could continue indefinitely, and at substantial expense. This cost would need to be weighed against the economic damage, and the political risk, of the strait remaining closed.

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How Come There Are Only AI Objections (Anthropic, Google, etc) When America & Israel Use AI But Not When Ukraine Does?

Posted on March 13, 2026 by Luke Ford

Ben Van Roo writes:

In 2018, Google walked away from a key AI contract, Project Maven, under employee pressure. I was furious at the double standard then. Social media and crypto were reshaping society in ways that dwarfed anything Maven touched, and nobody organized walkouts over that. But the dispute now is much bigger than Maven. That involved important software, used in targeting drones. What’s at stake now, though, is not just a small set of uses. It’s the transformation of warfare.
These kinds of objections were not raised when Ukraine started using AI in its war against Russia. Ukraine fields thousands of AI-guided autonomous drones. It deploys swarms that coordinate strikes with minimal human oversight. Western companies ship AI-equipped munitions directly to the front, and the tech community calls it democratic resilience. I agree. It is. But you don’t get to celebrate the triumph of AI-aided warfare when it protects Ukrainians and then sign a petition when the same technology might keep American troops alive in the Persian Gulf.
…The military is using Anthropic’s AI right now, today, in an active conflict, because there was a commitment by both sides to bring these technologies to bear and do better for our troops. The question for all the people who work on AI in Silicon Valley is whether they want to be in the room making our troops safer and more effective, or outside it congratulating themselves on not making any ethical compromises.

You cannot celebrate AI-aided warfare when it protects Ukrainians and then sign a petition when the same technology might keep American troops alive in the Persian Gulf. The moral language shifts depending on which coalition the technology serves.
In the Ukraine case, the dominant Western coalition was strongly pro-Ukraine. Governments, tech companies, journalists, and defense analysts broadly agreed that Russia was the aggressor and that Ukraine’s survival was legitimate. Inside that alliance structure, AI-guided drones became tools of defense. The narrative settled on innovation, democratic resilience, and asymmetric defense against a larger invader. When Ukrainian engineers built autonomous targeting systems or coordinated drone swarms, the story was that a smaller democracy used ingenuity to offset Russian mass.
When the same technology appears in a different theater, the coalition changes. The Persian Gulf context pulls in different actors and different moral frames. Tech workers in Silicon Valley, certain NGOs, parts of academia, and segments of the media belong to a coalition more skeptical of American military action in the Middle East. Within that network, autonomous weapons become a symbol of escalation, lost human control, or dystopian warfare.
So the same technology gets two completely different narratives. One says AI saves lives and protects democracy. The other says AI creates uncontrolled killing machines. Neither narrative is really about the technology. Both are about coalition signaling. Supporting Ukrainian AI drones signals loyalty to the pro-Ukraine coalition. Opposing American AI weapons signals loyalty to the anti-intervention or tech-ethics coalition.
This is why these debates feel inconsistent. The ethical language sounds universal, but the application is situational.
There is also a deeper structural reason for the difference. Ukraine reads as the weaker actor fighting for survival. Western audiences accept technological asymmetry when it benefits the underdog. When the United States deploys the same tools, the asymmetry flips. Now the technology amplifies the strongest military power on earth, which triggers fears about unchecked force. The inconsistency comes from both moral framing and power perception working together.
The argument here is a symmetry test. If autonomous targeting is morally acceptable because it reduces casualties and improves precision in Ukraine, the same logic should apply when American forces try to reduce risk to their own troops. Critics respond that the legitimacy of the war matters as much as the technology used to fight it. That is a fair point, but it is a different argument than the one most of them make publicly.
Most debates about military technology collapse into three questions: whether the war is seen as legitimate, who is perceived as the aggressor, and which coalition controls the narrative. Once those are answered, the ethical framing of the technology follows almost automatically.

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Decoding Historian Turned Pundit Phillips Payson O’Brien

Posted on March 13, 2026 by Luke Ford

Phillips Payson O’Brien is a historian who uses the past to strip the romance from the present. His work belongs to a tradition of materialist strategy that treats war as an industrial process rather than a series of heroic maneuvers. That position gives him a particular kind of usefulness right now, when wars in Ukraine and the Middle East keep exposing the gap between how analysts talk about conflict and how conflict actually works.
He frequently attacks what he calls the cult of the map. Traditional military analysts obsess over shifting territorial lines, but in his view a line moving ten miles in either direction is usually a distraction from the structural health of the underlying systems. He treats a tank not as a tactical asset but as a terminal point in a vast production and logistics chain. If the chain breaks, the tank is irrelevant. This lets him ignore short-term battlefield headlines and focus instead on whether a nation can sustain its losses over time.
His analysis of the Russia-Ukraine war, and of potential conflicts involving Iran, centers on systems warfare. Modern war, he argues, is a competition between high-technology production lines. That puts him in a coalition with defense technologists and advocates for cheap, mass-produced autonomous systems. While Washington think tanks focus on the prestige of carrier groups or advanced fighter jets, O’Brien runs the math on interceptor costs versus drone costs. The prestige platform loses that calculation.
That he teaches at the University of St Andrews gives him a specific kind of intellectual autonomy. He is physically and professionally removed from the Washington dinner circuit, where status often depends on not alienating future employers at the Pentagon or at major defense contractors. O’Brien carries none of those obligations. He can be aggressively critical because his career requires neither a security clearance nor a political appointment.
His sharpest and most sustained target is the Institute for the Study of War. He argues that ISW’s daily interactive maps, which track frontline trenches and village-level control, create a false narrative of who is winning. In his view, focusing on the line on the map is a relic of 19th-century military thinking. A side can retreat on the map while winning the war through the destruction of the enemy’s long-term capacity to produce and deploy equipment. He has made this point repeatedly about Russia and Ukraine, arguing that Western analysts misjudged Russian strength before 2022 because they were awed by the size of the Russian army on paper rather than the fragility of its systems.
He also targets the retired general class of commentators. Their experience in counterinsurgency or tactical maneuver leads them, he argues, to overemphasize human factors like will to fight or leadership, which he treats as secondary to the cold math of production. He was particularly vocal in criticizing anonymous Pentagon sources who blamed Ukrainian forces for failing to execute large-scale combined arms maneuvers during the 2023 counteroffensive. Those critics, he argued, ignored the absence of air superiority and treated war as a game rather than a material reality where equipment losses are permanent.
His recent book War and Power extends this critique to the Great Power framework itself. He argues that treating Russia as a Great Power based on landmass or historical reputation is a category error. True power, he claims, is full-spectrum, requiring deep integration of financial, technological, and societal resilience that Russia lacks. The book warns that the West consistently overestimates authoritarian states because it looks at the visible military parade rather than the invisible infrastructure: the sensors, the chips, and the logistics.
He shares more ground with Adam Tooze or Paul Kennedy than with the tactical biographers of generals. The Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze examines the Nazi economy and argues that Germany was fundamentally mismatched against the industrial power of the Allies, an argument that runs parallel to everything O’Brien has built his career on. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers by Paul Kennedy explores how economic strength and military commitments must stay in balance, providing the foundation for the idea that imperial overstretch is a mathematical reality rather than a political choice.
The rise of O’Brien reflects something broader in how the public consumes expertise. During the Cold War, the defense intellectual held specialized knowledge of nuclear throw-weights and grand strategy and served as a gatekeeper for that knowledge. The democratization of data, through satellite imagery, shipping manifests, and industrial reports, has changed that arrangement. A historian in Scotland can now challenge a general in Washington by pointing to the same open sources anyone can read.
O’Brien wins status not by proximity to the room where decisions happen but by claiming his model of war predicts outcomes better than the models used by the people inside that room. That claim has made him a figure of authority in the OSINT community and among tech-aligned analysts who treat modern war as a data problem. It has also made him a provocation to traditional defense circles who see his focus on production as deterministic and dismissive of the human art of command. Both reactions, in different ways, confirm that he has found a real pressure point.
In short:
The Washington strategists claim policy expertise.
The retired generals claim operational expertise.
The historians claim historical understanding.
The energy analysts claim market realism.
The restraint camp claims moral prudence.
The journalists claim narrative synthesis.

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Australia may be the most fuel-import dependent advanced economy in the world

Posted on March 13, 2026 by Luke Ford

Australia is unusually dependent on imported fuel for a rich country. The vulnerability comes from three layers.

First, import dependence.

Australia imports roughly:

70 to 80 percent of its refined petroleum products
almost all of its jet fuel
most of its diesel

The country produces crude oil but exports most of it because it is not the type best suited for its remaining refineries. Then it imports refined fuel back from Asia.

Second, shipping concentration.

Most fuel comes from a handful of Asian refining hubs:

Singapore
South Korea
Japan
China

Tankers travel through a few key sea lanes:

Strait of Malacca
South China Sea
Indonesian archipelagic routes

Those are some of the most strategically contested shipping corridors in the world. In a conflict involving China or a disruption in Southeast Asian shipping, Australia’s supply lines could be affected quickly.

Third, storage.

Australia historically kept very small fuel reserves. The country relied on constant tanker deliveries rather than large stockpiles. For years it had far less than the International Energy Agency requirement of 90 days of reserves.

Because of that problem Australia started buying strategic reserves stored in the United States around 2020. Since then it has been trying to expand domestic storage as well.

The result is a system that works extremely well in peacetime. Fuel arrives cheaply from giant Asian refineries.

But in wartime or a shipping crisis, the country could face shortages faster than most developed economies.

This is why the Australian government now subsidizes its remaining refineries and fuel storage. The goal is not efficiency. It is resilience.

Strategists often describe the tradeoff this way.

Globalization made fuel cheaper.
But it also turned supply chains into a strategic risk.

Australia is one of the clearest examples of that tradeoff.

Australia used to refine a lot of its own petroleum. Over the last twenty years most of those refineries shut down. The basic reason is that refining in Australia became more expensive than importing refined fuel from Asia.

Three forces drove the shift.

First, scale. Modern refineries work best when they are huge. Asia built massive facilities in places like Singapore, South Korea, China, and India. Those plants process several hundred thousand barrels a day. Australian refineries were much smaller. That meant higher costs per barrel.

Second, labor and regulatory costs. Australia has high wages, strict environmental standards, and expensive construction. All of that makes operating a refinery costly. A refinery in South Korea or Singapore can run the same operation cheaper.

Third, geography and trade. Australia sits next to the largest refining hub in the world. Singapore is one of the global centers of petroleum refining and trading. Shipping refined gasoline or diesel from Singapore to Australia is cheap. Often it is cheaper to import finished fuel than refine crude locally.

Because of those pressures, several refineries closed.

Examples:

Kurnell refinery in Sydney closed in 2014

Bulwer Island in Brisbane closed in 2015

Altona in Melbourne stopped refining in 2021

Kwinana in Western Australia stopped refining in 2021

Today Australia still has two operating refineries:

Lytton in Brisbane

Geelong in Victoria

They survive partly because the Australian government subsidizes them to maintain some domestic capacity for national security.

That leads to the strategic concern. Australia now imports about 80 to 90 percent of its refined fuel. Most comes from Asian refineries. In a major war or shipping disruption, that dependence could become a vulnerability.

So the short answer is simple. Australia can refine oil. It just became cheaper to let other countries do it.

Not massively cheaper per liter. The difference is small on each barrel. But the scale advantage makes the economics decisive.

Typical numbers look like this.

Refining costs themselves are often only about $2 to $3 per barrel for efficient refineries.

But the margin refiners earn for turning crude into fuel varies widely. In Asia the benchmark refining margin is often $7 to $15 per barrel, and in tight markets it can spike to around $30 per barrel.

So the cost difference between an efficient Asian refinery and a smaller high-cost refinery can be on the order of $1 to $5 per barrel, sometimes more depending on labor, environmental compliance, and scale.

That may sound trivial. But do the math.

A refinery processing
100,000 barrels per day

If costs are even $3 per barrel higher, that is

300,000 dollars per day
about $110 million per year

That gap alone can wipe out profits.

The structural advantages Asian refineries have:

Size
Some Asian refineries process 600,000 to over 1 million barrels per day, while the biggest Australian refinery was around 146,000 barrels per day.

Integration
Asian plants are often integrated with petrochemical complexes, spreading costs across more products.

Labor and regulatory costs
Lower wages and less expensive environmental compliance.

Regional hub
Singapore acts as the pricing hub for fuel in the region, and Australian wholesale fuel prices are tied to that benchmark.

So the key point is this.

The cost difference per barrel is modest.
But because refineries operate on razor-thin margins and massive volumes, even a few dollars difference makes domestic refining uncompetitive.

That is why Australia shut most of its refineries even though the country obviously has the capability to refine oil.

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Why Do Elites Love Paralympics?

Posted on March 13, 2026 by Luke Ford

Elites and journalists tend to love the Paralympics because it satisfies several incentives at once.

First, it provides an almost perfect moral narrative. The Paralympics offers stories of suffering, resilience, and triumph. Those are emotionally powerful and easy to communicate. For journalists this is gold. It produces stories that readers are unlikely to attack or criticize. Praising the Paralympics signals compassion without triggering political backlash.

Second, it allows status signaling at very low cost. Supporting disability inclusion has become a near universal moral norm in elite culture. When a journalist praises Paralympians, they are signaling that they belong to the compassionate coalition. There is almost no downside risk. Nobody accuses you of virtue signaling if the cause involves disabled athletes.

Third, it gives elites a way to celebrate human excellence without invoking controversial hierarchies. Elite sports like the Olympics involve uncomfortable discussions about genetics, national competition, and extreme specialization. The Paralympics reframes excellence in a way that feels morally uplifting rather than socially divisive. It shifts the focus from raw superiority to courage and perseverance.

Fourth, the narrative aligns with the professional incentives of media institutions. Newsrooms are under constant pressure to produce emotionally engaging content that is also morally safe. Paralympic stories perform well because they are inspiring and nonpolarizing. They generate engagement without creating ideological fights.

Fifth, the Paralympics reinforces a broader cultural script that elites like to promote. The script says society is becoming more inclusive and humane. Every Paralympic success story functions as evidence that modern institutions are expanding opportunity and dignity. That message flatters the institutions elites already inhabit.

Through the lens of David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory, praising the Paralympics signals loyalty to the “care and inclusion” coalition. The point is not that the admiration is fake. Many people genuinely feel inspired. But the enthusiasm is amplified because the topic perfectly aligns moral signaling, emotional storytelling, and coalition incentives.

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Iran Experts On The War

Posted on March 13, 2026 by Luke Ford

Afshon Ostovar is an expert on Iran, the Middle East, and security issues—Associate Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, and author of books like Wars of Ambition: The United States, Iran, and the Struggle for the Middle East. He says that Iran remains dangerous even when weakened. On March 12, he promoted his new Foreign Affairs piece “The Dangers of a Weak Iran,” writing: “Iran’s regime has remained unified and unbending. As Mojtaba’s first message signals, he’s a reflection of his father. No creativity, no foresight. Where does Iran go in the postwar with these guys in charge?” The article argues that despite devastating U.S./Israeli strikes (destroying much of Iran’s military, nuclear sites, navy, and leadership), the regime prioritizes survival, stays ideologically rigid under Mojtaba, and could pose greater risks through terrorism, proxy aggression, or even a nuclear dash—since a wounded Iran falls back on low-cost asymmetric tactics and may seek vengeance.
He’s pessimistic about creative change from the top, viewing the leadership as inflexible and reflective of past patterns.
Abbas Milani, the Stanford University historian and director of Iranian Studies (also a Hoover Institution fellow) says Iran’s regime is on the brink of collapse.
In a March 6, 2026, CNN Amanpour interview, he stated the Iranian regime has pursued policies making conflict almost inevitable for 47 years and is willing to pay the price with ordinary Iranians’ lives. He expressed profound sadness over innocent deaths but blamed the regime for the warpath.
Milani portrays the regime as responsible for escalation and suffering, increasingly illegitimate, with high public support for change (e.g., 88% cited), and the current war as potentially accelerating its downfall.

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NYT: ‘A Lot of Life Years Lost’: How NAFTA Shortened American Life Spans

Posted on March 13, 2026 by Luke Ford

The New York Times reports: “A study tracks how the North American Free Trade Agreement and trade competition with Mexico led to earlier deaths for American factory workers.”
Trade arguments usually center on GDP figures or consumer prices. This one focuses on mortality. In communities most exposed to Mexican import competition after 1994, life expectancy dropped sharply. For 45-year-old men in those areas, roughly three percent lost a full year of remaining life.
During the Great Recession, mortality fell in some areas because people drove less, which reduced accidents and cut pollution. The NAFTA shock worked differently. It did not spread pain broadly across the economy. It concentrated destruction in specific geographic communities built around manufacturing, and the damage spread through drug overdoses, alcohol-related illness, suicide, and chronic disease worsened by stress and the collapse of self-reported health. The “China shock” followed the same pattern after Beijing joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.
The history of NAFTA shows how powerful alliances shape what counts as economic truth. In the 1990s, a coalition of multinational corporations, trade economists, and centrist politicians from both parties framed free trade as a near-universal good. The narrative stressed aggregate benefits: cheaper electronics, lower clothing costs, stronger North American competitiveness. It treated the destruction of local industries as a manageable transition, the kind of short-term disruption that efficient markets correct over time.
David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory helps explain why that framing held for so long. Coalitions develop narratives that justify their own interests while presenting those interests as universal moral or economic truths. The pro-NAFTA coalition had every incentive to emphasize diffuse gains and minimize concentrated harms. The concentrated harms happened to fall on communities that lacked the political and institutional power to force the debate. The anti-NAFTA coalition, built from unionized workers and industrial towns, developed a counter-narrative of betrayal and abandonment. For decades, the pro-trade side could answer that critique by pointing to aggregate welfare gains. This study makes that response harder. When the harm includes shortened life spans, cheaper televisions stop functioning as compensation.
The biological decline the study documents also reflects something Ernest Becker described in his work on hero systems. The manufacturing economy gave men without college degrees a coherent path to dignity. A factory worker supported a family, belonged to a union, earned respect through physical competence, and tied his identity to a specific place and community. That system stabilized marriage rates, kept addiction lower, and anchored civic life. When the factories closed, the collapse was not only financial. Men lost the primary pathway through which their culture recognized adult male worth. The professional class, whose own hero system runs on credentials, mobility, and global networks, often failed to see what that loss meant at ground level. From inside their framework, NAFTA looked rational and progressive. From inside the older framework, it looked like an erasure.
Anne Case and Angus Deaton showed that the decline of manufacturing connected to rising opioid addiction and deaths of despair from alcohol, drugs, and suicide. This new paper gives that connection a harder econometric edge. The political staying power of anti-trade sentiment was never primarily about nostalgia or ignorance of economics. It persisted because the damage was biological and irreversible. Populist critics of NAFTA were directionally right that elite economists had been too optimistic, and the mortality data now backs that intuition. The deeper failure was institutional: the pro-trade coalition assumed adjustment would happen automatically, that workers would retrain and regions would diversify. That assumption ignored the social infrastructure of manufacturing towns. Economists measured GDP and consumer prices. They did not measure the erosion of the social order those towns depended on.

Further Reading

Given the war’s scope and its immediate effects on global energy and supply chains, the industrial policy dimension has become urgent in ways that would have seemed abstract just a month ago. The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed, oil prices have surged past $100 a barrel, and shipping lanes are being rerouted around the world. That changes the calculus on domestic production capacity, energy independence, and defense manufacturing in ways every serious reader should think through.
On Alliance Theory and minority security models, start with Mancur Olson’s The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Olson argues that groups with concentrated interests organize more effectively than diffuse majorities, which helps explain why minority communities often build security infrastructure the broader population never needs. It remains the foundational text for understanding why diaspora communities do what governments cannot.
Amy Chua’s World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability examines how market-dominant minorities generate both prosperity and resentment in multiethnic societies. Her framework applies directly to Jewish communities in the diaspora and helps explain why the security question is never purely about crime or terrorism but about the structural position of a community within a larger society.
On the broader geopolitics driving the Iran conflict, John Mearsheimer’s The Tragedy of Great Power Politics argues that states pursue security above all else and that conflict between rising and dominant powers is close to inevitable. Whether you agree with his conclusions or not, the book gives you a rigorous framework for thinking about why the United States and Israel calculated that a weakened Iran represented a window of opportunity rather than a moment for diplomacy.
Robert Kaplan’s The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate argues that physical geography shapes strategy more than ideology or intention. With the Strait of Hormuz now closed and Brent crude above $100, his argument about chokepoints and energy geography looks prescient.
On industrial policy, which the war has made the most pressing topic on this list, the essential starting point is Mariana Mazzucato’s The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs Private Sector Myths. Mazzucato argues that the state has historically driven the most significant technological and industrial breakthroughs, not private capital. She challenges the assumption that markets lead and governments follow, and her framework matters now because the war has exposed how dependent Western economies remain on imported energy and foreign supply chains.
Robert Atkinson and Michael Lind’s Big Is Beautiful: Debunking the Myth of Small Business makes the case that large industrial firms and deliberate state investment produce better economic outcomes than the small-business romanticism that dominates American political rhetoric. As defense spending accelerates and energy production becomes a strategic priority, their argument about the necessity of industrial scale feels timely.
Oren Cass’s The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America takes a different angle, arguing that the United States gutted its manufacturing base in pursuit of consumer prices and financial returns, leaving both workers and the country strategically exposed. The Iran war has made that exposure concrete: a conflict in the Gulf now threatens the industrial capacity of countries that no longer make the things they need.
Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Anne Case and Angus Deaton. This book documents how the decline of manufacturing and the weakening of unions led to a surge in suicides, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related deaths among working-class Americans. It argues that the modern economic system has failed those without a college degree, creating a profound sense of hopelessness that translates into a literal loss of life.
The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy by Dani Rodrik. This book argues that we cannot simultaneously pursue democracy, national self-determination, and full economic globalization. It suggests that by pushing globalization too far, we have undermined the national institutions that provide social stability and democratic legitimacy.
Industrial Policy for the United States: Winning the Competition for Good Jobs and High-Value Industries by Marc Fasteau and Ian Fletcher. This book serves as a comprehensive reference for the return of state-guided economics. It surveys the successes and failures of industrial planning in major economies and argues that a strategic government role is necessary for national security and economic resilience in an era of global competition.
Shared Prosperity in a Fractured World: A New Economics for the Middle Class, the Global Poor, and Our Climate by Dani Rodrik. This book offers a vision for a “new economics” that prioritizes the middle class and the green transition. It argues for place-based policies and a revitalized industrial strategy to repair the social fabric torn by decades of hyper-globalization.
Industrial Policy, National Security, and the Perilous Plight of the WTO by Petros C. Mavroidis. This book examines how national security concerns are reshaping international trade law. It argues that the rise of industrial policy is a direct response to a world where economic integration is no longer seen as separate from geopolitical survival.
Industrial policy debates in Washington do not follow a simple left-right divide. Several rival coalitions have formed, and they overlap in complicated ways.
The national security industrialists drive most of the recent policy shifts. Their core argument is that great-power competition has returned and that industrial capacity determines military power. They want the United States to rebuild domestic production in semiconductors, shipbuilding, rare earth minerals, batteries, and defense manufacturing. The National Security Council, the Pentagon, and defense-focused think tanks anchor this group. For them, supply chains are strategic vulnerabilities, and China’s state-driven industrial system represents a direct challenge that markets alone cannot answer.
A second group overlaps with the first but has a different center of gravity. Silicon Valley firms, venture capitalists focused on defense technology, and policymakers involved in the CHIPS Act and AI strategy make up what might be called the techno-industrial coalition. They care less about traditional manufacturing and more about semiconductors, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and space technology. Their argument is that technological ecosystems, not factory floors, determine geopolitical power.
The traditional free-trade coalition once dominated policy from the 1990s through the early 2010s. Wall Street, multinational corporations, trade economists, and international institutions make up its core. Their argument for open markets and global supply chains has not disappeared, but their influence has declined since the China shock, the pandemic supply-chain crisis, and rising geopolitical tensions forced a reckoning.
The labor and domestic manufacturing coalition has gained ground in that same period. Industrial unions, regional political leaders in manufacturing states, and economic nationalists share a focus that differs from both the security hawks and the tech optimists. They want domestic employment rebuilt and industrial communities restored. Tariffs, domestic content requirements, and regional manufacturing subsidies are their preferred tools, and the political realignment of working-class voters has given them real leverage.
A fifth group has grown up around clean energy. Renewable energy firms, environmental policy groups, and progressive economists support industrial policy as a way to build domestic supply chains for electric vehicles, batteries, solar panels, and grid infrastructure. The Inflation Reduction Act reflects their priorities more than any other recent legislation.
These coalitions cross traditional lines. National security hawks and labor advocates sometimes agree on reshoring manufacturing. Technology companies and defense planners often find common ground on semiconductor policy. Climate strategists and industrial planners overlap around battery supply chains. But the tensions are real too. Free-trade economists warn about inefficiency and trade wars. Labor groups worry that high-tech industrial policy will not produce enough middle-class jobs. Defense planners worry that climate priorities might distort strategic ones.
American industrial policy is therefore not emerging from a single coherent doctrine. It emerges through a series of overlapping compromises, each coalition framing its preferred policies as serving the national interest while protecting its own. The next decade will likely determine which coalition becomes dominant, and that outcome will shape how the United States organizes its economy.

ChatGPT says: The literature on national security industrial policy has exploded in the last five years. The United States and its allies are rediscovering that wars and geopolitical shocks depend on industrial capacity, supply chains, and energy systems.

Chris Miller: Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology

This is probably the most important book on industrial policy written recently. Miller shows how semiconductor manufacturing became the foundation of military and economic power. Modern weapons, intelligence systems, satellites, and communications all depend on chips. The key lesson is that the semiconductor industry is not a normal market. It is a strategic technology ecosystem shaped by government subsidies, export controls, and security alliances. This is the clearest example of why industrial policy is back.

Rush Doshi, The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order

Doshi explains how China has pursued a long-term strategy to displace American economic and technological leadership. His argument pushed many Washington policymakers to rethink laissez-faire globalization. The book shows how industrial policy can be a tool of geopolitical competition rather than just economic development.

Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy

Farrell and Newman explain how modern power operates through control of networks such as finance, payment systems, and technology supply chains. Their concept of “weaponized interdependence” is central. Countries that control key nodes in global networks can coerce others without firing a shot. Think SWIFT sanctions, semiconductor export controls, and rare-earth supply chains.

Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

Fishman describes how economic sanctions, export controls, and technology restrictions became central tools of American strategy. The key insight is that economic statecraft has replaced many traditional forms of military confrontation. Energy logistics are the hidden backbone of modern war. The Iran conflict highlights this because oil shipping lanes, refineries, and energy prices shape the global economy.

Daniel Yergin, The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations

Yergin explains how energy geopolitics is shifting with shale production, renewables, and great-power competition. The book shows why the Persian Gulf still matters even though the U.S. produces more energy domestically than it did decades ago.

Vaclav Smil, Energy and Civilization: A History

Smil’s work is slower and more technical, but it explains the physical foundations of industrial economies. Wars are not won only with weapons. They are won with steel, fuel, electricity, fertilizer, and logistics.

The U.S. can design extraordinary weapons but often struggles to manufacture them at wartime volumes. Two books explain this problem well.

Arthur Herman, Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II

This is about the U.S. industrial mobilization during World War II. It shows how government coordination with private industry turned America into the “arsenal of democracy.” The lesson is that wartime production requires institutional coordination that markets alone do not produce.

Alex Vershinin’s essays on industrial warfare

Vershinin writes about how modern wars are becoming “industrial wars” again. Ammunition production, drone manufacturing, and logistics capacity now determine outcomes as much as battlefield tactics.

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NYT: His Harvard Lab Was Thriving. Then Came the Cuts.

Posted on March 13, 2026 by Luke Ford

Jenna Russell writes:

Will Mair, who studies aging, lost almost all his research funds when the White House cracked down on Harvard. He was wholly unprepared for the upheaval that followed….
In October, he traveled to Malta to lead a long-planned conference on aging — after nearly canceling the trip because he lacked the funds for airfare. Flying back home, grateful for the days immersed in dialogue with other scientists, he took comfort in knowing he would re-enter the county with the protection of his new U.S. passport.
Then, at Logan Airport, an officer pulled him aside at the passport control checkpoint and started asking questions: What kind of research did he do? Who were his collaborators? What countries did his postdocs come from?
His hands shook as he answered politely, hiding his disbelief and mounting anger. After about half an hour, they let him go.

The story illustrates a structural shift in how American science has been funded since World War II. For about eighty years the dominant model was simple. The federal government funds basic research. Universities perform the research. Private industry later commercializes the discoveries. The National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Defense Department became the primary patrons. Universities like Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and UCSF built enormous research systems around that assumption.

The Mair episode shows what happens when that assumption breaks.

After World War II the United States created a system sometimes called the “Bush model,” after Vannevar Bush. The idea was that government should fund open-ended basic science because the private sector cannot tolerate the uncertainty.

Companies want projects that might produce a drug or product in five years. Basic biology often takes thirty years and fails most of the time.

That is why the scientist in the article tells the audience that companies cannot tolerate “all the weird, random science.” He is basically describing the economic logic behind NIH funding.

Ozempic is actually a good example. The drug ultimately emerged from decades of obscure metabolic research that no pharmaceutical company would have funded in its early stages.

Public health schools rely heavily on federal grants. The Harvard T.H. Chan School gets roughly 40 percent of its revenue from Washington. Engineering schools have more corporate funding and business schools rely on tuition and alumni donations.

So when the federal government cuts grants, public health labs feel it first.

That is why Mair’s lab suddenly had to operate like a startup. Instead of simply applying for NIH grants he is now pitching donors on Nantucket golf courses and consulting for a private longevity company.

The conflict in the story is not just Trump versus Harvard. It reflects a broader political shift. For decades the American science system assumed three things:

• Federal funding would grow every year.
• Universities would remain politically neutral in the eyes of government.
• International talent would flow freely into U.S. labs.

All three assumptions are now unstable. The federal government is increasingly willing to use funding as leverage over universities. Universities are deeply embedded in political conflicts. Immigration scrutiny now affects scientists and students.

When those conditions change, the whole ecosystem changes.

Most likely the funding model will diversify. More philanthropy from billionaires interested in specific fields like aging or AI. More university spin-offs and venture partnerships. Smaller labs with fewer permanent staff. More researchers moving between academia and private industry. You can already see that happening in fields like longevity research, where figures like Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, and Altos Labs have poured billions into private research institutes.

Mair consulting for a longevity investment company is a sign of that shift.

The irony is that American science became dominant precisely because it was insulated from this kind of short-term funding pressure.

The NIH system let scientists pursue strange ideas for decades without needing immediate commercial payoff.

If that insulation weakens, the U.S. may become more like other countries where research is fragmented between government, corporate, and philanthropic patrons.

Some people think that will make science more efficient. Others think it will kill the kind of long-term discoveries that produced things like mRNA vaccines, CRISPR, and modern cancer therapies.

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