#Tensions between the US and Iran escalate, with rising risks of sanctions and conflict

BREAKING: 🇮🇷🇺🇸 Iran calls for a U.S. congressional probe into President Trump and his family over alleged insider trading and market manipulation linked to the Iran war.

BREAKING: 🇮🇷🇺🇸 Iran says there are no talks on extending the ceasefire with the US.

🇨🇳🇮🇷🇺🇸 China and Iran are having to get a bit more creative due to America's blockade, with increased reliance on air and train transport. With sea access restricted, focus has shifted to air freighters and overland rail corridors (via Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan) to move goods to and from China. China buys roughly 90% of Iran's total crude oil exports, while Beijing serves as Tehran's top trading partner. Source: CIG (TG) / Writer: Samuel

Goddamn it Iran knows how to meme. It’s hilarious.

🇺🇸🇮🇷 Sec. Scott Bessent just said the U.S. is about to apply unprecedented economic measures against Iran: "From Epic Fury to economic Fury, at the president's order, we have raised the level even again. Watch this space for more announcements coming next week, because we are going to apply measures like have never been seen in the history of economic isolation on a country." No explanation of how that would stop Iran from just turning the screws on the Gulf states, but okay. Writer: Mhedi

Iran’s ability to meme gives me hope they can be successfully reintroduced into the international community someday

🇮🇷 The country Washington spent decades trying to isolate now sets the terms for everyone else's security. Geopolitical analyst Glenn Diesen says the region's governments are running out of room to pretend otherwise: "The countries are going to have to begin to adjust to reality. And that reality is that Iran is a huge power in the region. And if you want security, you have to take their security into consideration." Every capital hosting an American base is suddenly doing math it never had to do before.@Glenn_Diesen

🇺🇸🇮🇷 Trump's pressure strategy against Iran may be reaching its breaking point, because Tehran's answer to more pressure is more war Treasury Sec. Scott Bessent says Washington is preparing to move from “Epic Fury” to “Economic Fury,” with unprecedented measures designed to isolate Iran and squeeze its economy even harder. There's just one problem. Tehran is signalling that the more Washington turns up the financial pressure, the more Iran is prepared to turn up the military pressure. An adviser to Iran's Supreme Leader has now warned that if Iran's demands aren't met, Tehran could shift from a defensive posture to an offensive one. Meanwhile, CENTCOM commander Brad Cooper is reportedly becoming increasingly pessimistic that renewed fighting can be avoided. So while Washington publicly talks about pressure creating the conditions for diplomacy, the military appears to be preparing for the possibility that it produces exactly the opposite. And events on the ground are already moving in that direction. Two UAE-owned tankers were attacked by drones while transiting the Strait of Hormuz, with the UAE blaming Iran. The Houthis are escalating around Yemen and Saudi Arabia. And during our discussion, reports emerged of another attack targeting Saudi Aramco infrastructure. But America may be preparing for another round of fighting without having solved one of the biggest problems exposed by the last one: Weapons production. The U.S is finally fielding its Dark Eagle hypersonic missile, but the production rate is roughly one missile per month, with ambitions to increase that to two. And increasingly, America's adversaries appear to understand that the economics of warfare matter just as much as the weapons themselves. Fire cheaper weapons, force your enemy to burn expensive interceptors, drain their magazines, then use the weapons you've been saving. Trump's strategy rests on the assumption that enough pain eventually forces Tehran back to the negotiating table. Iran is betting on something very different: That enough pain forces America to decide this war simply isn't worth the price. And if neither side backs down, “Economic Fury” may not be the alternative to another war; it may be the trigger for it.@WeTheBrandon

🇺🇸🇮🇷 Washington's new plan is to strangle Iran's economy with unprecedented pressure... but 3,000 years of Silk Road trade stand in the way Bloomberg says the sanctions rollout comes next week, billed as the harshest economic isolation ever applied to a country. Malcolm Nance spent a career in naval intelligence around these waters, and his response is a walk across the map: six open Pakistani crossings, Caspian barges from Russia, Azeri cousins trading across the border, and dhows from Dubai Creek that never stopped sailing all war. Squeeze a bazaar civilization, he argues, and the black market simply becomes the open market, because "Logistics is war." His sharpest praise lands on the Joint Chiefs chairman for concluding that more strikes would just waste ordnance breaking rocks without reopening the strait, which Malcolm calls exactly what a real military leader is supposed to do. Malcolm also pushes back on the carrier catapult reversal, arguing the electromagnetic system exists for one reason: launch rate. A carrier's survival depends on getting its entire air wing off the deck before 300 inbound cruise missiles arrive, the new system recovers instantly while steam has to repressurize between launches, and China just installed the same technology on its third carrier because Beijing understood the math.@MalcolmNance