Iran Update: Iran's looming economic collapse and the importance of chokepoints | Hour 3

What's going on. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to thepetecleanershow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button. Get every episode for free, write to your smartphone or tablet, and again, thank you so much for your support. All righty, your Iran war update. I am told by uh I was actually watching Ben Shapiro. He's now delineating because you know we've talked about the Horseshoe Right or the trans right. I've been calling them. He's saying they're the grievance Party, and the other party is the what did he call it? I forget. It was like the the Exceptionalism Party, like we believe America is exceptional, and you know the left and the right have these you know, core beliefs all the way. Well, the Horseshoe Right, the trans right, because they identify as the right, but they're not really. They're like black Pillon. They're like all is lost, multipolar world, you know, lose American hegemony. We shouldn't project power. We're basically like, we're no good and so this is the sort of defeatism or the grievance party. And there are a lot of people over there that have left and right that have been saying that Iran is going to emerge. Remember a couple of weeks ago, I played some clips from this guy, Robert Pape Papes. I think he's like some you know, military guy from the University of Chicago. He advised all these presidents and all this stuff, and he was making all the rounds and he's talking about the escalation trap. And now Trump is in it. It's just going to be worse and worse and worse. And he just needs to go sheiate the defeat of America and get out and all of this because Iran is going to emerge as the superpower in the region. That I said this at the time, I do not believe that you can make all the predictions you want. I don't think that Iran emerges stronger. I don't not right, not from what I've been seeing. So here's your update. Number one. This is from Mayad Malechi. He is a senior fellow at the Foundation for defensive democracies. He says, within two weeks, Iran will not be able to store oil and will have to start reducing their extraction operations because if you can't move the oil, you know, out of the storage units and get them on get the oil onto the boats, and get the boats out to the other countries because you're blocked, right, which, like, that's what we're doing. We're blocking Iranian fleet. You're gonna block everybody. We're gonna block you too. Now nobody gets out, how about that? Right? Meanwhile, we'll start sweeping trying to find whatever minds you may have tossed into the water. And they haven't attacked us. They haven't attacked any of the ships or anything, not yet at least, so maybe they can't. Maybe they're restraining, don't know. But if you don't have any more storage capacity, that means you cannot keep pumping oil because you have no place to put it, which means you got to turn all that stuff offline. That in turn creates long term damage to the extraction system. The regime will not be able to get any money, so they can't pay salaries, they can't collect taxes, they can't sell metals, they can't sell petrochemicals. They can't sell petroleum. They are teetering on collapse. Iran's central bank warned the President of Iran, mass Food Pozzeshkian that rebuilding the country's war damaged economy could take more than a decade. According to Iran International. This from David Strom at hot air dot com. The Iranian economy was teetering before the war and is on the verge of imploding. Even if the war stops now, the blockade is lifted, and trade resumes, it's still going to take them a decade. That is the unsurprising news that the Central Bank of Iran delivered to the Iranian president. That's why he wants to and the war which every liberal in the West insists that Iran is winning. The Iranian regime was already dealing with many crises before Operation Epic Fury and Roaring Lion, before they even began, Before they took out billions of dollars worth of Iranian infrastructure. It's capital. We talked about this. The Iranian capital was like almost out of water. They were talking about moving the entire capital city. Its population is a wee bit restless. The IRGC was sucking down every available dollar to conduct its proxy wars against Israel, America and the West. This is what the Iranian people are fed up with. This like all of the money that Iran has been making and extracting from the populace has been diverted for jihad. Several major airports were damaged during the conflict, while strikes targeted oil facilities, refineries, and petrochemical installations that are central to Iran's export revenues and industrial supply chains. According to the assessment presented to the President of Iran, inflation could reach as high as one hundred and eighty percent. That's not a healthy situation, According to sources familiar with the discussions, Central Bank Governor Abdenasar Hamati has been urging Pozeskian to take urgent steps to stabilize the economy, including restoring full internet access and pursuing and agreement with the United States. Yes, they are. They have now set the world record for internet outage. They set the record, like, I don't know, a couple of days ago. What does that mean. Yes, it means that you know, people can't post the videos of the of the horrors of the IRGC and that's why they shut it all down. They don't want people sharing information and destabilizing the regime. But the other problem is that businesses that rely on the internet cannot do business. David Strom says, it's a mark of how economically and politically illiterate the media elite is that you can They can look you in the eye and tell you that Iran is winning this war. Their military is in tatters, their economy is failing, their most important ally, China is getting squeezed by losing access to Venezuelan oil and a massive slow down of oil from the Middle East, and their new friends in Europe are exposed as ninety pound weeklings. Oh to that point, I got a text here regarding a story that air during our newscast, Paul says, from that last news report, as is always the case, France insisting upon certain things happening, but doing absolutely nothing to actually initiate that they do happen. They need the oil more than we do. Send your own navy and air force to try to do something to clear the Strait of Hormuz, or just be quiet and let the folks that actually do something do it. Let me go back to back to David Strom, China wants the war over and is pressuring Iran to make concessions. Right, Pakistan has warmed to China as well, and so that's why Pakistan. Like if you were thinking, like, why is Pakistan leading the charge on these negotiations, right, Well, it's because China and Pakistan are pals, and so the Chinese are telling Pakistan you have to end this thing. We get like thirty percent of our imported oil from Iran by Weeni and they get it at a steep discount too. The civilian government wants the war over and is pressuring the IRGC to make concessions. Pakistan, which is hosting the talks, has moved troops and aircraft to Saudi Arabia. Why in preparation of defending the Saudis against renewed attacks from Iran, and Lebanon is considering allying with Israel to disarm Hezballah. Needless to say, Iran is not becoming a superpower here, people, this is not We are not witnessing the birth of a superpower state. I me eat segall from He's an Israeli journalist with an exclusive report that the Americans agreed in the ceasefire talks to release a certain portion of the frozen funds of Iran and to end the war. In return, they demanded a twenty year freeze on enrichment, the removal of enriched material from Iran, free navigation in the Strait of Hormuz with no tax payments or tolls. The Iranians discussed the nuclear issue contrary to instructions from Tehran. But the gaps were enormous. So that's interesting. Back in Tehran, the IRGC it was calling all the shots. Now they told the negotiators, don't talk about the nuclear program, but they did. You know, stories are powerful. They help us make sense of things, to understand experiences. Stories connect us to the people of our past while transcending generations. They help us process the meaning of life, and our stories are told through images and videos. Preserve your stories with Creative Video. 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This is from Ian who says I know from the semester I spent in France in eighty four that the French still consider themselves as a great power, massively overstating their own relevance. The kids I knew then are now running things and their latest pronouncements show the delusion. Lingers. Yeah, I mean we basically the umbrella of protection, this is my read on it. The umbrella of protection that was afforded Europe allowed them to basically become a services oriented and tourism oriented I would say continent, but economic zone. Right, that's what they do, and they just degraded their military. They took no responsibility for their own protection. They pumped up their social welfare spending and all of this stuff, and they've been living in this fantasy and it's over and this is a very difficult thing for them to accept. Eddie says, if we Iran, both China and the Democrat Party are also defeated. Yeah, well, I mean, look, I have said this, you know for years. I'm like, I am not one of these people who say Trump is playing seventy two dimensional chess. Okay, However, I do not believe that there was no plan. Okay. The truth is somewhere in between. You have a lot of people that have developed plans to deal with Iran. And I think Trump is a unique actor in this foreign diplomacy space because he is not of the quote unquote elites, right, the foreign diplomatic corps, right, He's not steeped in all of this stuff. But he has decades worth of the experience negotiating with people and getting concessions and extracting things from them that they don't want to give. And yeah, he's a bully, always has been. We've known this about him, and so he bullies everybody and that's part of his negotiation. He actually spells it all out in the book or his ghostwriter did part of the deal. He talks about all of these pressure points and how to get leverage and all of this. It's all in there. I don't know why people continually are surprised by this. And this is from James Thorne, chief marketing strategist at Wellington Altus. And so it's an investment firm, and he's got a map that he posted of China, and China has to its north, to its west, and to its south land barriers that prevent it from doing a lot of trading and stuff, and so it is heavy reliant on a series of straits choke points. And so what he refers to this as is the new great game. He says, the new great game is unfolding. I talked about this in the first week. This this idea of all these choke points. Trump's maritime strategy that he tried to implement initially, he got all this pushback, right. This was from John Conrad. It was a maritime industry, right. He publishes a website News and industry website, and he talked about the maritime strategy as it was developed. When Trump walked in the door. The things they tried to do like the past, the ships act right, build more ships, build the Golden Fleet. Golden Fleet had twenty to twenty five massive new ships that were specifically designed to hold and protect choke points. Like that is not somebody without a plan. They literally had a plan, and it it involve choke points. The Strait of Hormuz isn't even the most important one. Thorne goes on to say, no nation stands to gain more from the closure of the Strait of Hormus than the United States. Across the short term, medium term, and long term. Nobody stands to gain more than us. This logic is embedded in Trump's national security strategy. We covered this as well, with the Trump doctrine now visible in practice. Strategically, China loses on multiple fronts with Hormuz closed. Seaborn Middle Eastern supplies are now constrained, just as Venezuelan crewed is increasingly redirected towards the US Gulf Coast on short, politically secure routes. At the same time, the Strait of Malacca and with it, the broader Malaca dilemma, moves to the center of gravity. In parallel, the Sunda Lumbuk Makassar and Mendoro Straits remain critical arteries for Chinese trade and energy flows. Right, they got a whole bunch of these islands that go from the eastern seaboard of China and that go down and around like the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand. They got to run, They got to run through these straits. In fact, I have a quote in here from h ah, who is this guy, Singapore's Foreign Minister, Vivian Bala Krishana. I think is how he pronounces that, and he's like, there will be no negotiating for safe passage through the Strait of Hormus. Well, why is the Singaporean Foreign minister saying that? Well, they have a pretty important strait next to them too. I mentioned before the break there the Singapore Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan, and he was giving doing an interview or speech. I forget, and he's like, Singapore refuses to accept negotiating with Iran for safe passage of ships. Why would Singapore take this hard line? The Straits of Malacca, the Straits of Singapore is in fact another critical choke point. You may be aware that in fact, if you add up all the maritime oil, crude and refine. You might be surprised that actually more flows through the Straits of Malacca and Singapore and even the Straits of Hormos. If you think about global trade container trade, that's far more flowing through this place. And the most important geographical fact which most people are not aware of, the narrowest point in the Straits of Hormones is twenty one nautical miles. Guess what the narrowest point in the Straits of Singapore is. It's less than two nautical miles. So do you understand why we have to take a categorical position that international law and unclassed is the constitution of the oceans, and this is a right. Freedom of navigation as a right and not a privilege for ships and planes, and this is of profound importance to Singapore. So to your specific question, yes, I have engaged with the Iranian foreign minister before the war, and yes I'm sure I will engage him in the near future. But as a matter of principle and not because we're taking sides, I cannot engage in negotiations for safe passage of ships, on negotiate on toll rates because to do so would be implicitly eroding this legal principle. So again this is another example of Singapore upholding principle, not taking sides. All right, Iran International reports Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told his Iranian counterpart Abbas Aragatsi that it is important to prevent a new round of fighting and said Moscow is ready to help support a settlement. I heard a report earlier today that Pakistan is trying to organize another round of talks for this week. Israel and Lebanon are going to be meeting in Washington, DC, and I believe Marco Rubio is going to be a part of that meeting, which is pretty historic. I don't think Lebanon and Israel have ever negotiated anything together like that. Jd Vance says the Iranian delegation in Pakistan lacked authority to finalize a deal and needed approval from higher leadership. He told Fox News quote, this is ultimately why we left Pakistan, because what we figured out is that they were unable. The team that was there was unable to cut a deal, and they had to go back to Tehran either from the Supreme Leader or somebody else and actually get approval from them. So again, whether we have further conversations, whether we ultimately get to a deal, I really think the ball is in the Iranian court, because we put a lot on the table. We actually made very clear what our red lines were. We also made clear that we were actually that we would be very happy with this stuff. The President of the United States that he would be very happy if Iran was treated like a normal country. That's all we're asking here, Just act normal. Josh Wickoff, who runs the Twitter account inside Israel Intel, He reported that the US and Iran are discussing another round of face to face talks to secure a long term ceasefire after the last round ended without a deal. Officials hope to meet again before the ceasefire expires next week. Donald Trump said, hours after the start of the naval blockade in the Strait of Horn Moves that the Islamic Republic wants an agreement. He added that the right people from Iran have contacted the United States and emphasized that they will soon make concessions regarding the nuclear program in Lebanon. Actually, before I go there, let me do this also from Iran International, US President Donald Trump reposted an op ed from the Washington Post I Believe, saying that the ceasefire had allowed Washington to gain control over the Strait of Horror Moves and shift the balance against Iran. The op ed said that the US naval blockade of Iran had produced results similar to a military operation to seize carg Island. It said, what a difference a week makes. Last Tuesday, Donald Trump's critics were crowing that Iran had achieved a strategic victory in its war with the United States, leveraging control of the Strait of horm Moves to force the President to accept the ceasefire and return to the negotiating table. But now Trump has flipped the script by using the ceasefire to seize control of the Strait of Horror Moves. Meanwhile, Iran is demanding compensation from the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. I'm not really sure why Iran was the one that was, you know, flinging missiles and drones at them. Meanwhile, what does Europe have to say about any of this? Who cares? No, I'm kidding, I'll tell you. So. The what's her ursula? Vonderleyan? She says the cheapest energy. This is their plan. The cheapest energy is the one you don't use. All right, everybody, stay home, don't use any electricity. That is the best way to save on energy costs. But don't worry, she says, we are monitoring the situation Indonesia. Get this. Pete Hegseth, Secretary of War, just hosted his Indonesian counterpart and denounced a quote major defense cooperation partnership. The Strait of Warmuz is second highest volume oil checkpoint on Earth. The first is, as we heard from the Singapore Foreign Minister, number one, Straight of Malacca, Indonesia. Eighty percent of China's oil imports pass through the Strait of Malacca or the Strait of Singapore. Global oil shipping choke points are being secured by the US military and their partners. Trump is securing the board. Again. I'm not saying Trump is playing seventy two dimensional chess, but he did come into office with a maritime plan, a national security strategy, both of which focused on securing the choke points. And it seems like that's what he's doing. All right. Let me talk about what's going on with Lebanon. Hezbala leader Naim Kasem urged Lebanon to cancel their meeting with Israel taking place in Washington, DC, reiterating the group's rejection of direct talks. We call for a historic and heroic stance by canceling this negotiating meeting. They did not. It did occur, and according to the reports of moments ago from NBC News, Lebanon and Israel agreed in the talks today that Hesbelah must be fully disarmed and that Iran should no longer dictate Lebanon's future. The Israeli ambassador said, we agree with the Lebanese side on freeing Lebanon from the Iranian occupation represented by Hesbola, and he went on to say, we will not allow a terror organization to continually fire missiles into our population centers. So that's not a good development for Iran, who's totally winning this thing, guys. Then there was this message from Machram Rabah. He is an assistant professor of history at the American University of Beirut. Lebanese people, you need to stop lying to yourselves. This country isn't stuck in a regional war, and it's not a victim of chance or bad luck. The truth is much simpler and harsher. Lebanon is under Iranian occupation and that's the real reason it's turning into a killing field. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard and Hezbollah are using the Lebanese, all Lebanese as human shields. This isn't a slogan, it's not an exaggeration. This is reality. And by the way, I would add, if you are not aware of this tactic at this point after Gaza, I'm not sure what other evidence you need. Right this is the playbook. More than a hundred is rarely. Strikes on Lebanon should be a wake up call. He says, your home isn't safe, your neighborhood isn't safe, Your area isn't safe. Not because that's fate, but because there are people who have decided to use these civilian spaces for their projects, hiding their weapons, holding their meetings, running their networks, storing their money among the people, and meeting their mistresses. You are not protected, you are exposed, and you're dead. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Are you going to keep living in a system that's turning your homes into targets or are you going to start reclaiming your country, the state, the streets, and what it means to be a Lebanese citizen. Lebanese. Most famous Lebanese, I believe is Ellen DeGeneres. Okay. So, also, a whole bunch of ships are coming to America. As Neil Diamond prophesized, an unusually large number of crude oil tankers on the open seas has the American Gulf Coast as a destination as these ships are redirected to load cargoes bound for markets around the world already experiencing shortages. By the way, so oil was trading now at about eighty eight dollars a barrel, right, because there's another source, there's another supply. So they're coming to America again, like Neil Diamond said, right, they're coming to America and they're going to get the oil. They're going to pick up some Venezuelan oil, right, and then they're going to go and they're going to distribute it into the marketplace. And as I mentioned yesterday, the OPEC nations agreed to open up. They got their East West pipeline running again in Saudi Arabia and they're increasing production. So, like everybody is working to minimize the cost of the oil and to shift the entire marketplace to the point where if iron stays offline, they are the only ones that are going to suffer. Here we go, foreign buyers are voting with their ships. American energy means stability, strength, and freedom from Middle East blackmail, said President Trump on Monday, owned truth social He said massive numbers of completely empty oil tankers are en route to the United States to purchase American energy. Shipping data posted by maritime intelligence company Windward shows one hundred and seventy one crude tankers are bound for the US Gulf Coast to load crude oil cargoes. One hundred and seventy one tankers. The typical month you see one hundred and ten, so that's an extra sixty. The surging vessel traffic comes as nations throughout Europe and Asia grapple to secure energy supplies and regional prices skyrocket. Germany is providing emergency fuel relief to its citizens, while officials in the Philippines recently declared a national energy emergency as the world looks increasingly to the US to replenish war starved oil and gas markets. Let me jump over to the text line here and get some get some comments. Jefferson says, this reminds let yes, oh no, that's from earlier. It reminds me of the board game risk. Yeah it does. Yeah, this is this is the right the game board is changing. The Hellia says, put on a sweater. Well, it's summertime. So I said seven oh four number says I said a few weeks ago. If Iran gets its tolls, others will eventually demand the same thing, right, and that's what we're protecting against. You don't get to set a precedent of tolling international waterways because if you do it, everybody will do it, and that will lead to conflict because they will not let adversaries through, and then you turn into what we see in hormones. Right, Like, this is proof of the importance of protecting international waterways. So they are free, Ronnie says culture Wall. Glad we have the same taste in music. Indeed, indeed, all right, back to this piece. This is from the Center Square. The Monday West Texas. West Texas intermediate crude futures settled in on Monday at ninety nine dollars per barrel, while the international benchmark Brent crude was at ninety nine dollars barrel. Oil market research firm Kippler estimates US crewed oil exports in April will reach five point two million barrels per day. That's US exports. That is up from three point nine a day three point nine million, so there is a plan, it seems all right. That'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, so if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to thepetecleanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.