What a difference eighteen months makes.
As I write this, a two-week ceasefire between the United States and Iran is hours old. Whether it holds is anyone’s guess. The war that the U.S. and Israel launched on February 28 has already killed American service members, destroyed universities and elementary schools, closed the Strait of Hormuz, and sent shockwaves through every market on the planet. The president who promised to end wars threatened, in his own words, that “a whole civilization will die tonight.” Iran’s ambassador at the United Nations called it incitement to genocide. Experts are debating whether the targeting of bridges, railways, and power grids constitutes war crimes. Children in Tehran are dead.
This is not what we signed up for.
The two-week ceasefire, brokered through Pakistan’s intervention, is a fragile reprieve. Iran has accepted negotiations in Islamabad beginning Friday. But we have already seen what happens when diplomacy is sabotaged. Iran’s IRGC intelligence chief was assassinated mid-conflict, negotiators have been targeted, and the pattern of setting deadlines only to extend them has made the entire process feel performative. Time will tell if this ceasefire holds.
What won’t change is the math. Wars cost money. Money comes from somewhere. And when governments run out of honest revenue, they print. Every dollar created to fund conflict is a dollar that steals purchasing power from the people who earn it. Every bomb dropped on Iranian bridges is paid for with dollars. Every aircraft carrier repositioned to the Persian Gulf runs on the full faith and credit of the United States Treasury. Every escalation widens the deficit, increases the pressure on the Fed, and further erodes the credibility of the dollar as a neutral global reserve currency.
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