America’s Secret “Gold War”    Joan King

Everyone’s watching the Middle East.  Oil prices… Meetings with Iran… And the Strait of Hormuz.  But that’s not the real story.  The real story is something much bigger. It’s happening quietly… methodically…  And it’s far more dangerous to US hegemony.  China is dismantling the foundation of U.S. financial power.  Not with weapons.  With gold.  For nearly two decades, they’ve been building something intelligence analysts now call the “Gold Corridor.” The “Gold Corridor” isn’t just a bunch of warehouses holding China's growing stockpile…  It’s a parallel financial system – backed by gold… and operating totally outside the US dollar.  You’ve never heard about it because there were no headlines – and no press conferences.  Just steady execution.  Now, here’s the part no one is telling you…  Washington knows this is happening – and their only real counter-move requires one thing:  Much higher gold prices.   That’s why this moment matters. Because for the first time in history, the world’s two superpowers both need gold to rise…  The outcome isn’t speculation…  It’s math.  And it creates a very specific opportunity – but not in gold itself.  A tiny group of gold companies have produced gains of 100%… 500%… even 2,000%+ – and that’s just in the last two years!  The best part is…  The biggest move hasn’t happened yet.  But you’d better not wait.  Go here for details on America’s “Gold War” with China and find out what’s coming Subscribe to The King Signal for weekly regime updates, exact ticker targets, and macro positioning alerts delivered before the consensus catches on. Subscribe  This email may contain affiliate links and paid placements. If you choose to act on these offers, Interscope Finance Media LLC may receive compensation from our partners at no additional cost to you.

Trita Parsi: "Washington's search for a 'silver bullet' to defeat Tehran has made it all but impossible to secure a deal"

Trump’s Iran blockade snatches defeat from the jaws of victory

Greetings,
Trump thought the blockade of the Persian Gulf would be a silver bullet that would bring Iran to its knees. Instead, it erased the desperately needed pressure release that Trump secured through the ceasefire. Thanks to the blockade, oil prices now exceed the levels seen during the war itself. In essence, with this move, Trump snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

But as I explain this piece for Responsible Statecraft, the incessant search for an escalatory silver bullet that forces Iran to surrender is not unique to Trump. It's a pathology of US foreign policy toward Iran.

As always, your thoughts are welcome.

Sincerely,
Trita Parsi 

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Trump’s Iran blockade snatches defeat from the jaws of victory
Washington's search for a 'silver bullet' to defeat Tehran has made it all but impossible to secure a deal
Responsible Statecraft

Trita Parsi
May 2, 2026

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/trump-iran-blockade/  

It appears Donald Trump once again snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by heeding the hawkish counsel of the warmongers at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

As I have argued before, the fragile ceasefire disproportionately favored the United States over Iran: Trump secured his central objective — a swift exit from a costly war — while Iran forfeited its primary source of leverage, namely the inflationary pressure of elevated oil prices. Tehran, by contrast, remained unable to achieve its core objective — meaningful sanctions relief — without entering a difficult diplomatic process with Washington.

The asymmetry was stark: Trump could afford strategic patience, whereas Iran risked squandering the most consequential gains the conflict could have yielded if negotiations faltered or collapsed.

In short, this emerging status quo could have constituted a quiet but decisive victory for Trump. Yes, Iran would retain control over the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz — but it does so today as well and would do so in almost any scenario. But the status quo would have seen oil prices drop as the Iranians would allow tankers to transit in order to collect fees. And as long as oil prices came down, Trump’s position at home and vis-à-vis Iran would have strengthened.

But then Trump committed a familiar and consequential error. Once again, he followed the advice of Israel and one of its key supporters in Washington, the FDD advocacy group.

The strangulation of Iran: take 5023

FDD argued that blockading the Persian Gulf would swiftly cripple the Iranian economy and coerce Tehran into capitulation, allowing Trump to achieve through economic strangulation what he had failed to secure through military force. In short, it was sold to him as a silver bullet. More on that later.

According to this logic, the blockade would “effectively zero out” Iran’s export revenues within days, inflicting losses of nearly $500 million per day. With oil exports halted, Iran’s limited storage capacity would be filled within weeks, forcing the costly and technically damaging shutdown of its oil wells. This, FDD claimed, would dramatically reverse the strategic balance — transforming the Strait of Hormuz from a perceived Iranian asset into a crippling Achilles’ heel, while handing Washington the invaluable advantage of time. Pressure on Iran would escalate sharply while pressure on the United States would rapidly dissipate.

Trump was fully on board. His long-sought subjugation of Iran suddenly appeared tantalizingly within reach. “The blockade is genius,” the president told reporters. “Now, they have to cry uncle; that’s all they have to do. Just say, ‘We give up.’” (Notably, an FDD staffer has reportedly since joined Steve Witkoff’s team.)

Predictably, the opposite occurred. FDD’s confident calculations and tidy logic were, as so often, rooted more in wishful thinking than in hard reality. By its own projections, Iran should have exhausted its storage capacity nearly a week ago. Yet satellite imagery shows Tehran still actively loading oil onto tankers at Kharg Island. While the blockade has undeniably increased economic pressure, there is no sign of the acute storage crisis — or the cascading collapse — FDD confidently promised Trump.

But by targeting Iran’s oil exports, Trump did more than complicate an already fragile diplomatic pathway — he tightened global supply and drove prices upward. In fact, thanks to the blockade, oil prices now exceed the levels seen during the war itself.

Exxon’s CEO told shareholders today that gasoline prices are poised to rise even further, noting that “the market hasn't seen the full impact of [the Iran conflict] yet.” Meanwhile, Joe Kent, Trump’s former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, cautions that “the blockade is now triggering a global fertilizer shortage that will cause major food security crises and potential famines.”

In short: the desperately needed pressure release Trump secured through the ceasefire has been entirely undone by FDD’s vaunted silver-bullet blockade.

The lure of the silver bullet 

There is a pathology in U.S. policy on Iran that transcends administrations and party affiliations: The incessant search for an escalatory silver bullet that brings Iran to its knees, forces it to capitulate, and enables the U.S. to assert its superpower dominance and avoid a compromise with the Islamic Republic.

Across 47 years, the hunt for this fabled silver bullet has echoed on — yet nothing answers back. Countless diplomatic opportunities have been sacrificed, and face-saving exit ramps have been burnt in the process. Yet, the quest continues.

The demand for Iranian capitulation and the enduring faith in elusive silver bullets are deeply intertwined. In January, Trump believed that the mere threat of military force would compel Tehran to surrender. After issuing a series of increasingly explicit warnings that Iran pointedly ignored, he proposed a calibrated strike — one to which Tehran should respond symbolically by targeting an empty American base. Iran refused outright, making clear that any attack would trigger a full-scale war.

Interpreting this defiance as a failure of credibility rather than a rejection of coercion, Trump escalated. He ordered a substantial buildup of military assets in the region, convinced that a critical mass of force would finally deliver the decisive breakthrough — the long-sought silver bullet. It didn’t.

Indeed, Witkoff revealed in an interview that Trump was frustrated that, despite his military threats, Iran had still not “capitulated.”

Clearly, more escalation was needed. The next imagined silver bullet was the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Midway through the war, a GCC official told me that Trump had assured regional leaders the conflict would last no more than 100 hours. Israeli media similarly reported that he told Britain’s Keir Starmer it would be over within three days. The logic was stark: the killing of Khamenei would trigger either the regime’s rapid implosion or its immediate capitulation. It proved to be yet another illusory silver bullet.

Nor did the sweeping bombardment of Iran’s civilian infrastructure deliver the long-sought breakthrough. A Bloomberg analysis found that only 32% of the damaged buildings were linked to military targets — the overwhelming majority were civilian. Even this devastating and indiscriminate campaign failed to produce the decisive outcome its architects had promised.

The blockade-on-the-blockade is merely the latest in a long line of delusional silver bullets that American presidents have chased instead of pursuing far less costly and far more effective diplomacy. I suspect that a stunning number of those silver bullets were cooked up by FDD.

Trita Parsi is the co-founder and Executive Vice President of the Quincy Instituteand author of Losing an Enemy - Obama, Iran, and the Triumph of Diplomacy. This was republished with permission from the author’s Substack.

What happened in Isfahan region in Iran was not a rescue mission of a pilot.

Geciteerd

Carlos Lopez

@CarlosL84862301

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10 apr.

What happened in Isfahan region in Iran was not a rescue mission of a pilot. It seems to have been a covert operation to steal anywhere from 400 to 970 pounds of nuclear material at the Isfahan nuclear site. This is Press TV reenactment of what happened that day on April 3, 2026.

https://x.com/i/birdwatch/t/2042474800099061952?source=6