☕️ GENTLEMEN’S AGREEMENTS☙ Sunday, March 8, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Special bonus edition: Does Trump have a plan to avert an oil crisis that could end his presidency, or is it all just chaos and reckless brinksmanship? The pundits say chaos. Here's another take.

Good morning, loyal C&C supporters, it’s Sunday— and if you woke up panicking about Iran, this post is your antidote. Welcome to Daylight Saving Time (DST). Change your clocks, and congratulations if you are like Michelle (i.e., certifiable) and love the extra hour of daylight after dinner in exchange for two months of jet lag and brain fog. Today we have an emergency special edition roundup, since a horrid new narrative is trying to launch, and we need to squash it. Due to its importance, I have decided to open this normally locked bonus post to the whole C&C family (though only paid supporters can comment). Is the Trump Presidency really over? Or is that a fake narrative? I’ll give you the evidence, and you can decide.

⛑️ C&C ARMY BRIEFING — IRAN WAR UPDATE ⛑️

The week-old war in Iran exploded into a new phase yesterday— and so did the hysteria. The New York Times ran the story, headlined “U.S. and Israel Expand Strikes on Iran as Fuel Depots Burn in Tehran.” We’ve crossed an unwritten but flashing red line, the third rail of Middle East war strategy, and are now directly attacking Iranian oil facilities— a politically risky move that has been verboten for, well, ever. Some Trump supporters are starting to panic.

Last night, coalition forces mostly destroyed Tondgouyan Oil Refinery (located south of Tehran) and multiple storage depots. Towers of incandescent flame turned night into day, and giant plumes of thick, black smoke blackened the capital’s skyline. “The attacks,” the Times noted, “appeared to be the first targeting energy infrastructure since the joint U.S.-Israeli air war on Iran began last weekend.”

What the Times was trying to say was that the strike crossed an invisible red line, because the longstanding gentleman’s agreement for making war in the Middle East has always been don’t touch the oil.

For decades, there’s been a tacit understanding among all major players in the Middle East —including the US and Israel— that oil infrastructure is off-limits in military conflicts. Not because anyone signed a treaty, but because everyone understood that hitting oil facilities was mutually assured economic destruction. Oil prices spike, stock markets plunge, and the attacking country gets blamed for wrecking the economy.

When Israel struck Iran in October 2024, for example, the Biden administration explicitly pressured Netanyahu to leave nuclear sites and oil facilities alone. Israel assured Biden they’d only hit military targets. The mullahs watched that, and got exactly the confirmation they wanted— even when Israel was retaliating for a direct Iranian missile attack, Washington drew a red line around the oil. The gentleman’s agreement held.

By striking the Tondgouyan refinery, Trump just shattered that implicit agreement, and it’s now lying on the desert sand in shards. The markets are not taking it well. Neither are some Trump supporters.

Given the scale of the transgression, the political risks with the midterms looming in six months, and the fact they’re all nervous as geriatric cats attending a rocking-chair convention, you can understand why some thoughtful Trump supporters are mildly freaking out. For example, consider this tweet by Geiger Capital, yesterday (reposted by my friend and very smart thinker Jeffrey Tucker):

Mega-tweeter Mario Nawful (3.1m followers) even pinned this gloomy tweet:

In another tweet right below that one, Nawful declared, “Iran is losing this war militarily, but winning it strategically.” In sum: it’s not looking good for Trump and Iran is winning.

Despite always being wrong about Trump predictions, pollster Nate Silver (3m followers) tweeted that the strike didn’t seem smart to him, what with the affordability narrative featuring so prominently in the midterm elections:

FBI whistleblower Kyle Seraphin wondered what this will do to the price of groceries. Maybe it’s time to hoard toilet paper again:

Author Brandon Weichert tweeted that it will sink the US economy and it will be the end of the Trump presidency.

My goodness. I bet your social media feed will be packed with similar sentiment. So it’s time for an emergency narrative intervention. Get ready to have your brain armor-plated against the incoming cognitive SCUD missiles.

The media’s deception begins with mischaracterizing the strike on the Tondgouyan refinery. The New York Times unhelpfully referred to it only as a “domestic facility” and part of Iran’s “energy infrastructure,” completely omitting the critical context that the major oil refinery and storage tanks located right outside the capital city were there for a reason. Tondgouyan was the IRGC’s key military fuel depot and ammunition dump.

Let’s tackle this in four points.

🚀 The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC for short, isn’t just a conventional military force. It is both a shadow government and economic powerhouse that operates more or less independently of the civilian leadership (hence its recent defiance of President Pezeshkian). Last week, Fortune reported, “Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard controls a sprawling business empire that dominates the economy”— more than half of Iran’s GDP.

Far from being just another Middle East army, the IRGC runs oil, banking, telecom, agriculture, real estate, transportation, shipping, and even Tehran’s international airport through its network of front groups and wholly owned subsidiaries. It’s less of a military force and more of a Fortune 500 company with a rocket division. Like a Walmart with tanks.

The Jerusalem Post reported that Iran allocates a third of all oil revenue directly to the IRGC. The IRGC shipped about 85,000 barrels a day to Syria, and sells the rest mostly to China through a so-called “shadow fleet” designed to avoid sanctions. By blowing up the IRGC’s own refinery, Trump wasn’t just hurting “Iran” in a general sense— he was trying to bankrupt the IRGC specifically, by collapsing its parallel economy.

Many folks are deeply confused about the significance of yesterday’s refinery strike. It didn’t damage Iran’s ability to export oil, since the refinery strike on Tondgouyan didn’t affect the country’s export facilities like Kharg Island (more on that in a moment). It was a refinery for domestic fuel. Hitting Tondgouyan hit the IRGC’s ability to keep its trucks and war machinery running, and undermined the regime’s social compact— selling fuel to its own population.

It was a precision strike on the IRGC’s economic oxygen, not reckless chaos. And it did not degrade Iran’s oil export capability, even though that’s what the useless Times hopes to trick everyone into believing.

Tondgouyan was one gentleman’s agreement shattered. But it wasn’t the only one. The strike’s real target might not have been the IRGC— it might have been China. But first, let’s see what the US is really doing around Iranian export facilities, since that’s what matters for global oil prices.

🚀 You’ve probably never heard of Kharg Island. But it might be the most strategically important chunk of rock on Earth right now. Kharg is a tiny, sun-blasted limestone island sitting in the shallow turquoise waters of the northern Persian Gulf, about fifteen miles off Iran’s coast. It doesn’t look like much. You’d never holiday there. (TripAdvisor: zero stars. “No beach, no pool, smells like petroleum. Would not recommend.”)

But crammed onto its roughly five-by-two-mile footprint is a labyrinth of massive crude oil storage tanks, seven deep-water loading jetties, pumping stations, and miles of pipeline— the throat through which ninety percent of Iran’s crude oil exports gush on their way to market. That’s roughly 1.5 million barrels a day, almost all of it bound for China on a shadow fleet of sanctions-dodging tankers.

It’s a patch of land roughly the size of a below-average golf course that can collapse the global economy. That would be a bad day on the links. But losing Kharg alone would crush Iran into nanoparticles— a military hole-in-one.

Kill Kharg, and you don’t just damage Iran’s economy — you sever its aorta. The mullahs never bothered building a backup course, because of that gentleman’s agreement, which shielded its oil infrastructure from attack. Nobody would dare. Killing Kharg would crash the global economy.

Think of it: the entire Iranian oil economy (and the world’s markets) had a single point of failure protected only by a gentleman’s agreement. The trouble is, President Trump has not been overly praised for his gentlemanliness. Or think of it this way: Iranian energy infrastructure was protected by a prisoner’s dilemma. Both sides refrained from striking oil facilities because both sides needed the oil. But Trump changed the equation, by making Iran’s oil unnecessary. He didn’t just break the agreement; he made it irrelevant.

Indeed, coalition forces have not damaged Kharg Island. They are leaving it alone. But late last night, Axios ran this misleading headline:

Axios’ framing was Trump is breaking his promise not to put ‘boots on the ground.’ Axios invested most of its column inches describing a plan where Israeli and US special forces would enter Iranian territory and take control of the uranium enrichment facilities. (We obviously can’t bomb them, since it would create an environmental disaster.)

But Axios buried the lede. Late in the story, this short, intriguing paragraph appeared:

If the US seizes Kharg Island, it will control 90% of Iranian crude oil exports. That could be a great help in getting oil prices under control once the fighting dies down.

But that wasn’t all.

🚀 There is another vast, untapped global reservoir of available cheap oil. That reservoir is called Russia.

While all eyes linger on the smoke and flames in the Persian Gulf, the world’s largest available reservoir of cheap crude is sitting right there, frozen in place not by geology but by policy. Russia produces around ten million barrels a day —making it the world’s third-largest oil producer— but Western sanctions have kept much of that bottled up, stranded on tankers with nowhere to go, or diverted through sketchy shadow fleets at steep discounts.

Before the Ukraine war, Russian crude flowed freely to Europe, India, and global markets. Proxy War sanctions changed the plumbing but didn’t drain the reservoir. The oil is still there —vast quantities of it— just waiting for someone to grab the spigot.

Well, guess what? On Friday —the day before the strike on Tondgouyan— Reuters reported, “US could lift sanctions on more Russian oil, says Bessent.”

Bessent said the US is considering lifting sanctions on Russian oil to “bring relief to the market.” In other words, the administration already had a replacement lined up for every barrel of Iranian crude taken offline by the war. “There ‌are ⁠hundreds of millions of sanctioned barrels of crude on the water, and by unsanctioning them, Treasury can create supply,” Bessent told Fox Business’ Larry Kudlow. “And we are ⁠looking at that,” he added.

In fact, he’s not just looking. He’s already doing it. On the same day, the BBC ran this remarkable headline:

In short, Secretary Bessent granted India a 30-day waiver of sanctions on Russian oil. Now it can buy cheap oil from Moscow’s fleet, millions of gallons of which just happen to be bobbing around the oceans, ready for delivery.

In one stroke of a Treasury pen, Russia gets its revenue back, global prices stabilize, and Iran’s leverage —“you can’t touch our oil without wrecking the world economy”— evaporates. The gentleman’s agreement didn’t just depend on nobody being willing to strike the oil. It also depended on there being no alternative supply.

Trump found another third way, hiding in plain sight behind our own sanctions regime. That’s the second ‘gentleman’s agreement’ Trump snapped in half, the unwritten rule that Russia would be punished forever. Now it’s negotiable.

But why would Trump even take this geopolitically radioactive risk in the first place? Why is he gambling with the global economic stability he so dearly purchased last year in 2025? What possible stakes justify it?

Follow the barrels. It’s not just about winning the ‘war’ with Iran. Trump is shooting for all the marbles: China.

🚀 In 2025, China imported 1.38 million barrels of Iranian crude a day— which is roughly 13.4% of China’s total seaborne oil imports. Almost all of it flowed through the IRGC’s shadow-fleet tankers via ship-to-ship transfers off Malaysia. Last year, CBS News ran a dramatic undercover film of twelve of those exchanges, in one day, in broad daylight. (I have no theory for why CBS could find them, but sanctions police couldn’t.)

That Iran-China supply line is now severed. The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed. Kharg Island may be about to be seized. China’s “teapot refineries” —small, independent operators who were the key buyers of sanctioned Iranian, Venezuelan, and Russian crude at steep discounts— just lost their two cheapest sources.

That was the third gentleman’s agreement Trump vaporized— the tacit agreement that China could indefinitely buy cheap rogue-state oil off Malaysia in broad daylight.

Trump’s Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and China hawk Elbridge Colby has explicitly advocated a strategy of denying China the strategic resources it needs to achieve superpower status. Last month, Colby told Foreign Policy, “The US’s grand strategy is to deny China access to energy and markets.” Iran sits on the world’s third-largest proven crude reserves and second-largest natural gas reserves. A post-conflict Iran aligned with Washington wouldn’t just remove a nuclear threat, it would permanently place the US’s hand on one of China’s energy spigots.

China has now lost two of three major oil suppliers: Venezuela and Iran. That’s not a coincidence. But the third domino may also be falling, too: Russia. If Trump does a deal with Russia to end sanctions, Russia could start selling its oil to the world, and China will lose its third pillar.

Right now, China gets Russian oil at steep discounts because of sanctions. Russia must sell cheaply because its buyer pool is limited— basically China and India, via the shadow fleet. Sanctions made China the customer of last resort, which gave Beijing enormous leverage to dictate bottom-barrel prices.

If Trump lifts sanctions, Russian crude returns to the open global market. Russia can sell to Europe, Japan, South Korea, India — anyone. Moscow no longer needs to give Beijing the friends-and-family discount. Market competition replaces monopsonistic dependency.

So China wouldn’t just lose primary access to Russian oil— it would lose the cheap price. China would go from paying bargain-basement rates for sanctioned Russian crude to competing at full market price against every other buyer on earth. Three pillars of discount energy —Venezuela, Iran, Russia— all knocked out in the span of a few months.

Not only that.

🚀 Guess who will howl the loudest if Trump drops Russian oil sanctions? The green-sweatshirted former comedian in Kiev, that’s who. Zelensky’s comedic leverage for two years has been “keep sanctioning Russia, they’re the aggressor.” If Trump cuts a deal that lifts Russian oil sanctions in exchange for a peace agreement (or even just Russian non-interference in Iran), Zelensky gets dragged to the negotiating table whether he likes it or not.

He has no argument. What’s he going to say? Don’t unsanction Russia? When American gas prices are spiking, and the Administration can say that lifting sanctions will stabilize the global economy and help win the Iran war? That’s a losing hand politically. Zelensky can’t compete with cheap gas at American pumps.

Ironic. Zelensky’s leverage just became Trump’s leverage. Zelensky’s best argument against Russia is now Trump’s best argument against Zelensky.

It also explains why President Trump has been publicly squeezing Zelensky so hard. Three days ago, Politico reported that Trump said, “It’s incredible that Zelensky is an obstacle to an agreement... He already had no cards, and now he has even fewer.” Two days before that, Trump called Zelensky the “P.T. Barnum” of Ukraine— referencing how he’d conned the Cabbage into trading hundreds of billions in US weapons for nothing.

In other words, Trump was pre-weakening Zelensky’s negotiating position before offering Russia the sanctions-relief carrot. By the time an oil deal with Moscow materializes, Zelensky has been pre-positioned as the guy who’s being unreasonable, not any sympathetic underdog.

That makes four. The gentleman’s agreement that the West would support Ukraine unconditionally, no questions asked, just encountered a snag.

Just last year, Russia, China, and Iran held a joint meeting with the IAEA to defend Iran’s nuclear program. Now we are offering Russia Iran’s market share, China is watching its cheap oil disappear, and Ukraine’s card deck is exhausted. The axis of resistance is being dismantled not by bombs alone, but by deals.

Three separate conflicts, one unified strategy, four dusty gentlemen’s agreements. We are finally beginning to see all the dots coalescing.

🚀 So let’s return to our panicking pundits. Mario Nawful says Iran is “winning strategically.” Nate Silver thinks the strike “doesn’t seem smart.” Brandon Weichert predicts “the end of the Trump presidency.” Kyle Seraphin worries about grocery prices. Geiger Capital sees nothing but chaos. The sky is falling!

With all due respect to these thoughtful folks, they’re looking at one chess piece and missing the board.

Iran is a burning country whose Supreme Leader is dead, whose military is openly ignoring its civilian government, whose navy has been sunk, whose allies are fleeing like rats off a torpedoed destroyer, and whose only remaining asset —Kharg Island— looks likely to be seized by US special forces. That’s not “winning strategically.” That’s a regime in free fall watching its final friends heading for the exits.

What looks like reckless escalation is actually a four-dimensional squeeze, and every piece was in position before the first Tomahawk hit Tondgouyan:

• The IRGC is being financially strangled. Its domestic refinery is destroyed, its revenue sources are cut, and its soldiers were offered amnesty to surrender.

• Russia is being peeled away from Iran with an offer Moscow can’t refuse— hundreds of millions of barrels of unsanctioned oil revenue, plus a path to end its economic isolation.

• China is watching all three of its discount oil suppliers —Venezuela, Iran, and soon maybe Russia— disappear or reprice simultaneously, as tariffs bite from the other direction. Without oil, it can’t even think about invading Taiwan.

• And Kharg Island —Iran’s crown jewel— sits there undestroyed, waiting to be captured. A seized terminal is worth infinitely more than a bombed one.

As for oil prices, why wouldn’t they stabilize? The Administration is already turning the valves. Secretary Bessent explained it on Friday. Russian oil floods back onto world markets, Saudi spare capacity kicks in, and the US remains the world’s largest producer. Like Trump said, the spike will be temporary.

But the strategic realignment will be permanent.

The people freaking out are making the oldest mistake in the Trump playbook: they’re confusing the appearance of chaos with actual chaos. They said the same thing about tariffs. They said it about the Abraham Accords. They said it when Trump walked across the DMZ to shake Kim Jong-un’s hand. Every single time, the “experts” saw madness, and every single time, later events showed the method underneath.

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not minimizing the stakes. This is an ultra-high-stakes poker game. An infinite number of things could go wrong. But I challenge the narrative that there is no plan. It seems clear to me that a carefully sequenced blueprint is unfolding. And those are just the parts we can see.

But let’s say there is no grand plan. Maybe it is all chaos, and Trump just keeps getting lucky. At some point, when every “reckless” maneuver keeps lining up with the same strategic objective —squeezing China, flipping Russia, decapitating the IRGC, and consolidating US energy dominance— we must consider the possibility that the guy who wrote The Art of the Deal might know a thing or two about making one.

Have a blessed Sunday! Thank you, once again, for your continued loyal support, as we work diligently to squash evil narratives, like today. Come back tomorrow to kick off a brand new week of wild essential news and irreplaceable commentary. We now return you to your regularly scheduled Daylight Saving Time confusion.

Don’t race off! We cannot do it alone. Consider joining up with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds. I could sure use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can: ☕ Learn How to Get Involved 🦠

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