A soft closure of the Strait of Hormuz can inflict much of the same damage as a declared blockade The February 28 US-Israeli strikes on Iran have turned a regional military confrontation into a global market shock. The conflict has begun to reprice energy, shipping, insurance, aviation, and financial risk. For global …
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The Regime May Still Hold the Center, but Holding the Center Is Not the Same as Maintaining State Capacity The February 28, 2026, U.S. and Israeli air strikes have not yet ended the Islamic Republic, but they have weakened the Iranian state’s ability to govern. State failure does not begin …
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Doha Converted Gas Revenue Into Global Influence and Marketed Itself as the Supplier That Delivers Even During Turbulence Qatar reads Iran-U.S. tensions through the blunt logic of self-preservation. Doha worries less about “regional instability” than about losing the conditions that let it build an liquefied natural gas empire with limited regional contestation. …
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Reports in major outlets that Tehran has floated a “commercial bonanza” to the Trump administration should be understood less as an investment roadmap than as a survival strategy. As Donald Trump’s 10-to-15-day deadline for a “meaningful” deal with Iran enters its decisive phase, Iranian officials appear to be reframing diplomacy …
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Importers Benefit, but Transparency Suffers, and Price Gaps Widen with the Spread of Cheap Sanctioned Oil China’s independent refiners, known as “teapots,” increasingly are replacing Venezuelan crude with Iranian oil. This shift shows how sanctions pressure, commercial reality, and geopolitics now shape global oil flows more than formal rules. As U.S. enforcement …
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The Gap Between Potential and Performance Does Not Stem from Sanctions Alone Iran sits atop one of the world’s largest proven natural gas reserves, estimated at roughly 1,200 trillion cubic feet, second only to Russia. On paper, this should make Iran a major energy exporter and a consequential player in regional gas …
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Iran’s Sanctions-Evasion Infrastructure Has Become Systematic Rather than Improvised In early February 2025, President Donald Trump issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 2 (NSPM-2), formally reinstating his “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran. The directive sought to deny Tehran any path to nuclear weapons, constrain its ballistic missile program, and dismantle support for regional proxies by …
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The latest round of US sanctions imposed on Iran mark a shift in Washington’s strategy, moving beyond conventional financial limits to target the intertwined financial and digital networks that sustain Tehran’s economy and political control. US officials say software, fintech, and digital payment systems are now as important as oil …
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‘While countries like the US and Australia have reopened mines, they remain dependent on China for refining,’ says energy strategist Umud Shokri In the 1990s, the US started offshoring a lot of our mining and a lot of our processing. So, a lot of that went to China … There’s …
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Iran Economy & Innovation Commentary Dr. Umud Shokri EN AR TR FA According to media reports, the Trump administration is thinking about physically intercepting and inspecting Iranian oil tankers on the high seas as part of a major escalation of Washington’s so-called “maximum pressure” campaign against the Islamic Republic. According to March 2025 reports, American …
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