The "Wing of Zion" circled off the Israeli coastline for four hours while Iranian missiles struck Haifa and Tel Aviv. Circled. Waiting. Then flew west. Over Greece. On to Berlin.

The man who invoked Purim and the lion’s roar and told his people there would be “heavy costs” — was in Germany hiding like a coward when the costs arrived.

Forty-eight hours before the bombs fell, Iran had agreed in Geneva to full IAEA verification, irreversible uranium downgrade, no stockpiling above civilian levels. Oman’s foreign minister called it a breakthrough. The strike date was already circled on a calendar in Tel Aviv before the talks began.

Then they killed the Supreme Leader. Thirty-five years. Eight American presidents. Sanctions, assassinations, a war with brutal war by Western darlin gSaddam, the twelve-day war. Khamenei outlasted all of it. He did not outlast this. And yet... the missiles kept flying.

The Assembly of Experts convened. The IRGC escalated. The succession activated without fracture. Washington wanted to prove that American power can decapitate a government and trigger its collapse. What it proved — in front of the entire world — was the opposite.

One man ordered the war from a resort in Florida. The other (the architect) ordered it, made his speech, and got on a plane. Eighty-five children died in a school in Minab. The Strait closed by afternoon. The ceasefire request came before dinner.

This is where it leads: a closed Strait, a martyred Supreme Leader who unified every Iranian regardless of faction, a rare earth embargo already running, and a multipolar world that just watched the Islamic Republic absorb a decapitation strike and keep fighting. The empire didn’t break Iran. It demonstrated, live, that Iran cannot be so easily broken. Every government in the Global South filed that lesson.

They called it Epic Fury. Read what it actually was in our latest substack 👇

https://open.substack.com/pub/islanderreports/p/the-last-entry-iraq-syria-lebanon?r=32qouw&utm_medium=ios

🇧🇭 Bahrain is in revolution. Saudi armour is rolling in to crush it. You will not see this on CNN.

For three decades Washington told you the missiles are for the people (we have to commit mass murder to save them!) — for the oppressed, the voiceless, those living under theocratic tyranny. It funded colour revolutions. Cheered manufactured protesters in Iran. Ran Farsi-language CIA social media accounts urging Iranians into the streets. Every last word of it in the name of freedom. But where is CNN and the BBC demanding freedom and liberty for this popular uprising in Bahrain? Fecking hypocrites.

The majority Shia population of Bahrain are in the streets. Saudi tanks are crossing the King Fahd Causeway. Again. Where is the White House statement cheering on this popular uprising for liberty and freedom? Where is the State Department’s grave concern? Silent — because Bahrain hosts the Fifth Fleet, and the Al Khalifa family are the right kind of autocrats. The kind that price their oil in dollars. The wrong kind of autocrat is simply the one Washington doesn’t own. Washington loves brutal dictatorships and the feeling is mutual for the Sunni monarchs that are loyal to the empires exporting of actual terrorism.

Now watch the boomerang.

The regime change virus they launched at Tehran is airborne and unguided. Bahrain shaking. Saudi Arabia’s Shia Eastern Province — sitting on top of the kingdom’s oil fields, furious for forty years — watching every frame of this. How stable is Kuwait? Qatar’s LNG offline. Every Gulf monarch who rented their soil to Washington is now a target not of Iran’s choosing but of America’s regime change boomerang.

And Israel. When historians go looking for what Operation Epic Fury actually produced, they may well find the regimes that fell were not in Tehran. The Likud fantasy of a redrawn Middle East may yet arrive — just not in the direction anyone promised the Israeli public.

They wanted regime change in Iran. They may have lit the fuse on everything else.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ Darwinian level arrogance and incompetence.

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LNG shipping rates have gone from $40,000 to $300,000 per day — a 650% vertical climb in less than a week — and the men who ordered the strikes that caused this are still strutting around the Oval Office talking about “strength.” That is not strength. That is the economics of catastrophe unfolding in real time, and it will reach every kitchen table from Tokyo to Turin before anyone in the beltway finishes reading the intelligence brief they probably won’t bother to read anyway.

The Strait of Hormuz — through which roughly 20 million barrels of oil per day transit, representing north of 20% of global seaborne oil trade — has effectively ceased to function as a commercial corridor, and what’s doing the closing is less about Iranian missiles, and more the insurance market, the invisible hand of capital that everyone in Washington claims to worship suddenly delivering its honest verdict on Operation Epstein Epic Fury. Major commercial operators, oil companies and insurers have effectively withdrawn from the corridor, creating a de facto closure comparable in character to the Red Sea disruption — but with far larger volumes at stake. The market has spoken. The war lobby apparently has not listened.

Qatar declared force majeure on gas exports, and sources say it may take at least a month to return to normal production volumes — meaning global gas markets will experience shortages for weeks even in the unlikely scenario the conflict ends today. Read that sentence again slowly. Even if it stopped right now. Even if every bomb stopped falling this afternoon and every missile went cold, the damage is already baked in, the supply chain already severed, the cryogenic infrastructure already in shutdown sequence — because the cryogenic nature of LNG requires specialised storage maintaining temperatures of approximately -160°C, making it impossible to simply store excess production in temporary facilities, and once disruptions occur, restarting operations requires weeks of careful, sequential rehabilitation to avoid thermal shock to the entire system.

Qatar supplies 20 percent of the world’s LNG — and if that’s off the table, countries must scramble for what remains. Japan scrambles. South Korea scrambles. Taiwan scrambles. India, which sources nearly half of its LNG intake from Qatari supply under long-term contracts , scrambles. These are not abstract geopolitical actors — these are the factories that make your semiconductors, the power grids that keep hospitals running, the fertiliser supply chains that feed a billion people, and every one of them is now competing in a spot market that has been stripped of a fifth of its supply overnight. This is what cascading systemic failure looks like before it hits the news cycle.

Dutch TTF futures, Europe’s benchmark gas contract — rose 35% on Tuesday alone, with prices on the week running roughly 76% higher, while the Japan-Korea Marker benchmark reached a one-year high. Europe, still carrying the scar tissue of 2022 when Russia’s war on Ukraine sent the continent into an energy convulsion it spent hundreds of billions surviving, is now staring down a second shock — this one detonated by an ally that drew the target circles, pulled the trigger, and handed Europe the wreckage as a fait accompli — no consultation, no warning, no framework for what follows, just the bill. The shutdown also affects downstream products including urea, polymers, methanol and aluminium , meaning the price destruction moves through industrial supply chains like a slow haemorrhage through every sector that uses energy as an input — which is every sector.

Read the rest on our Substack 👇

https://open.substack.com/pub/islanderreports/p/the-300000-question-nobody-in-washington?r=32qouw&utm_medium=ios

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WATCH: Israeli missile narrowly misses RT correspondent Steve Sweeney and crew

‘Israel knew exactly who was on that bridge. To deny it is simply inconceivable’

Tune in to the new episode of East Meets West for more on what’s actually happening in Lebanon

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