Read “Martin’s Theory” and pass it along. It’s important.
NOTE: My friend Alexander Muse is one of the most prolific and thoughtful voices online, and well worth following on all platforms. Please read and share. — RDM
by Alexander Muse
October 7, 2026
On October 22, the energy analysts at Kpler reported a number that the drive-by media refused to report. The volume of Iranian crude floating outside the blockade zone had fallen to zero, down from roughly 136 million barrels when the war began in February. No new Iranian cargo had loaded since August 25.
Because payments lag deliveries, Kpler expects the associated revenue to dry up by mid-December. For a regime that has spent 45 years converting oil into terror and rockets, that is the sound of the register closing.
President Trump’s decision to finish what the June 2025 strikes began was the right one. The price we are paying for it — higher gasoline, a drawn-down global inventory, and the regrettable loss of (shockingly few) American lives — is worth it, for one simple reason: the costs are temporary, while the gains are durable.
Thousands of lives will be saved. Oil inventories refill. Centrifuge halls, missile plants, and the financial plumbing of the world’s largest state sponsor of terror do not.
The governing principle is one every conservative understands from the schoolyard. A nation that can be held hostage will be held hostage. Since 1979, the Islamic Republic has treated the Strait of Hormuz as its insurance policy, the threat that made every American president calculate the cost of an oil shock before deciding how many Iranian war crimes to tolerate.
The Navy’s own history of the 1987 Tanker War records Iranian mines in the shipping lanes and the escort mission, Operation Earnest Will, that followed. We fought that round and then went back to tolerating the rest. Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis grew up under that umbrella. Treasury reported that the IRGC Quds Force moved more than $1 billion to its clients in 2025 alone, and that was a year in which Iran was significantly weakened by the fall of Assad.
Why now, rather than in 2027? Because the clock was running in Tehran’s favor.
Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell assessed in July 2025 that the June strikes had set the nuclear program back by one to two years, and the regime wasted none of that time. With oil money flowing, it simply started rebuilding. More alarming still was the pace of conventional production. Ballistic missiles and attack drones were rolling off assembly lines by the thousands, and the hard truth about even the finest air defenses in the world is that they can be saturated.
Shoot enough objects at a Patriot battery at once, and some will get through. The campaign objective followed from that arithmetic: destroy the stockpiles, destroy the factories that replace them, and cut off the cash that would otherwise replace the factories.
Each leg of that strategy now has receipts. CENTCOM commander Adm. Brad Cooper said on October 16 that American operations had prevented $25 billion in Iranian oil exports and helped freeze roughly $350 million in cryptocurrency. Treasury’s October 8 action targeted what it called the regime’s remaining shadow fleet; its October 15 action targeted the banks and oil-sale intermediaries that turn tanker cargoes into usable currency.
The proxies are feeling it too. On August 20, the Treasury designated ten people running a cash network for Hezbollah that moved hundreds of millions of dollars across borders. On October 2, it dismantled a France-linked Hamas fundraising ring. On January 16, before the first bomb fell, it hit 21 individuals and entities financing the Houthis. And on October 27, IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi told the Security Council that his agency had identified no effort by Iran to repair or reconstruct the facilities damaged in 2025 and 2026. A regime with no cash does not rebuild what it cannot pay for.
Now the bill, stated plainly. The International Energy Agency’s October 14 report puts global observed oil stocks 509 million barrels below their end-of-February level. Aramco’s chief executive, Amin Nasser, said on October 5 that replenishing those stocks while meeting demand could take up to two years once the strait fully reopens.
Those are the honest numbers, and they are smaller than they sound. Spread across 730 days, refilling 509 million barrels requires an average net build of about 697,000 barrels a day. The world consumes about 102.4 million barrels a day. The refill is 0.68 percent of consumption; the entire hole is roughly five days of global use. On March 11 the 32 members of the IEA agreed to release 400 million barrels of emergency stocks, which is precisely what emergency stocks exist to do. You draw the reserve during the storm, and you rebuild it in the calm.
Compare that bill to the one the Democrat Party handed Americans without any war at all. AAA’s national average for regular gasoline today is $4.20. Joe Biden’s record, set June 14, 2022, was $5.02. A driver filling a 15-gallon tank pays about $12.18 less today than at Biden’s peak, during a shooting war in the Gulf, with the world’s most important chokepoint disrupted. Adjusting the 2022 figure for the inflation Biden also gave us and his peak works out to about $5.70 in today’s dollars, making today’s pump price roughly 26 percent lower.
Crude tells the same story. Brent closed October 29 at $115.28 against a 2022 daily peak of $133.18; WTI closed at $105.51 against $123.64. Biden had no Hormuz closure and no Iranian campaign to blame. Instead, he waged a war on American drilling, and prices were higher.
The Democrats and their willing accomplices in the drive-by media promised something far worse than this. They promised $7 gasoline, a global depression, and a Middle East in flames from Beirut to Muscat. What actually happened is that American exposure proved limited: about 0.4 million barrels a day of crude moved through Hormuz to the United States before the war, around 2 percent of our consumption, and the Gulf adapted faster than the pessimists allowed.
The Energy Information Administration estimates Middle Eastern production shut-ins fell from 10.9 million barrels a day in May to 4.8 million in September, a 56 percent recovery in just four months. Its October outlook has Brent averaging $84 in 2027 and $74 by that year’s fourth quarter, with gasoline just under $3.60. Roughly half of American households heat with natural gas or propane, and the EIA expects them to spend less this winter than last.
The adaptation is the part of this story that will matter in 2036. The IEA recorded 5.6 million barrels a day of Gulf exports bypassing the strait in September. Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline to Yanbu can carry 7 million barrels a day and was moving about 2 million early this year; the war filled it. The UAE’s Habshan-Fujairah line carries roughly 1.8 million a day to the Gulf of Oman. ADNOC’s second Fujairah pipeline, half-finished in May, has been accelerated toward completion in 2027, and Kpler puts the combined UAE bypass capacity near 3.6 million barrels a day when it is complete.
Meanwhile, Chevron is rebuilding damaged, long-offline pipelines from Iraq across Syria to the Mediterranean coast. Kuwait’s oil minister is now discussing routes through neighboring states as well. None of this was happening at this speed in January. The Gulf states had tolerated concentrated transit risk for decades because the alternative cost a lot of money. The war made the risk cost even more. September’s attacks on the East-West Pipeline, after it was repaired, taught the second lesson in the same semester. Build redundant routes, and defend the pumping stations and ports that feed them.
The strongest objection deserves an answer, so here it is. Diesel sits at $6.32 a gallon, near its September record, and the truckers and farmers who burn it are carrying more of this war than the rest of us thanks to targeted attacks by Ukraine on Russian refineries. The IEA expects global demand to contract by 2.6 million barrels a day this year, and some of that is real hardship. Americans have died.
All of this is true, but all of it has to be weighed against the alternative, which was a nuclear-capable Iran with a treasury full of oil money and a missile force built to overwhelm whatever we could put in the sky. The price of that world would not have been denominated in cents per gallon; it would have been denominated in cities, and the people who would have paid it first live in Tel Aviv, Riyadh, and Manama, not in Georgetown.
Consider also what it cost the president to choose this. He launched a major campaign in February of a midterm year, with every pollster in Washington telling him that voters punish the party in power for gasoline prices and nothing else; he could have waited until November, run on peace and quiet, and left the missile factories humming for his successor. He did the opposite; he played the decade instead of the quarter. That is exactly what conservatives say they want from a president and almost never get.
What should Washington do with the ground it has taken? Keep the blockade on Iranian oil and lift it on everyone else; lawful commercial passage should be protected and prohibited Iranian trade should be strangled, and the Navy can tell the difference. Make Gulf producers finish and defend their own bypass infrastructure with their own money, since the pipelines serve their trade. Refill strategic reserves gradually as supply allows rather than chasing barrels at the top of the market. Keep Treasury aimed at the facilitators and shadow banks while leaving humanitarian channels open. Judge the nuclear question by inspector access, material accounting, and reconstitution indicators rather than by replaying footage from last June.
And then, if Iran creeps back toward a bomb, the United States now has an option it did not have for 45 years: go in and destroy it again, at a time of our choosing, without the strait as a gun to the world’s head.
At the end of the day, deterrence is a reputation, and reputations are built by paying prices that adversaries assumed you would refuse. Every administration since Carter did the math on Hormuz and concluded that the Islamic Republic’s proxies were cheaper to live with than to confront. Trump did the math differently, and the ledger now shows a terror sponsor with no oil revenue in sight, a nuclear program nobody is repairing, and a Gulf that is paving its way around the trap.
‘Two years of refilling tanks is a modest fee for that. The question for the next president, of either party, will be whether he has the nerve to keep the account current.
— Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com.
Damn straight he was!!! The problem is that most people are just too stupid to see the big picture!!!