Category: Geopolitics, Economics, Middle East, Energy, US Foreign Policy

A darkly lit war room with an empty gold chair at its centre, a looping explosion reel playing on screen, and an amphibious assault ship visible through the window.

Operation Epic Flurry

Trump’s April 6 deadline is not diplomacy. It is a ten-day window. The Marines are not sailing toward the Persian Gulf for a holiday.
TAGS: Operation Epic Fury, Iran war, Trump, Pete Hegseth, Rupert Murdoch, Strait of Hormuz, ground invasion, Kharg Island, US Marines, 82nd Airborne, Michael Wolff, Netanyahu, doublespeak, Australian complicity

Russian nesting dolls representing layers of the US-Iran war: money, military force, great power rivalry, and Australia

The Stench of Desperation: Trump’s War on Iran and the Babushka of Greed, Ego, and Catastrophe

To make sense of Trump’s war on Iran, imagine a Russian
babushka doll. The outer layer is the story the Pentagon feeds
us. Inside it: petrodollar entanglements, Kharg Island
war-gaming, the strategic patience of Moscow and Beijing,
Netanyahu’s fantasy of the purifying blow. At the very centre,
smaller than it should be, is Australia. Urban Wronski opens
all six layers and does not like what he finds.

A date palm silhouetted at dusk on the Iranian coast, oil tankers idle on the Strait of Hormuz behind it.

The Place of Dates

Through the Strait of Hormuz — named either for the Zoroastrian god Ahura Mazda or the Persian phrase for ‘Place of Dates’ — flows 20% of the world’s oil. Or rather, it did. Iran has now reduced traffic by 97%. Urban Wronski traces the etymology, the date palm’s lessons in patience, and what empires learn the expensive way.

Editorial illustration depicting a fractured military command structure, symbolising the internal divisions within the Trump administration over Operation Epic Fury against Iran in 2026.

No Good Exit

Two weeks into Operation Epic Fury, the Trump administration has no exit strategy, no agreed objective, and a secretary of defence who believes God has a plan for the outcome. Inside the fractures, the contradictions, and the slow drift toward a quagmire nobody in Washington will name out loud. By Urban Wronski.

An evangelical church interior with a Middle East map projected above the pulpit, flanked by American and Israeli flags.

The Fog of Holy War: How America and Israel Blundered Into a Conflict They Cannot Win, Cannot Define, and Cannot End

There is an old military principle, so obvious it barely needs stating: before you start a war, know what winning looks like. Know how it ends. Have a plan for the morning after. The United States and Israel, in launching Operation Epic Fury against Iran … Continue reading The Fog of Holy War: How America and Israel Blundered Into a Conflict They Cannot Win, Cannot Define, and Cannot End

Silhouetted figures seated at a circular table in a bare, harshly lit room, backs turned to a door standing slightly ajar, light bleeding through the crack.

No Exit

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a play about three people locked in a room with an unlocked door nobody would walk through. He called it No Exit. He was writing about Operation Epic Fury seventy years before it happened. A forensic anatomy of a war built from mutual imprisonment, strategic miscalculation, and the fatal habit of assuming the other side thinks like us.

Dark editorial illustration of shadowy figures in ornate portrait frames on a gallery wall, a burning city visible through a window behind them, suggesting the architects and beneficiaries of a catastrophic war.

Netanyahu, MBS, Putin and the Useful Idiot 

Russia feeds Tehran American targeting intelligence. Netanyahu needs the war to continue. MBS counts his oil revenues. One hundred and seventy-five children were at school in Minab when the missile struck. The mathematics of this catastrophe have been visible from the start. That nobody in Washington appears to have done the sums is the most damning fact of all.