Anthropic’s prospective IPO could invite ordinary investors into a company valued above $2T. That’s the figure Reuters reported last week after reviewing its confidential prospectus. In March 2025, a private financing round valued Anthropic at $61.5B. By May 2026, another round put it at $965B. A tremendous increase in the company’s valuation has already happened before its shares reached a public exchange. Reuters, Anthropic’s March announcement, May announcement

There’s also a tremendous amount left to pay for. Reuters reported more than $8B in operating losses in 2025, even as revenue grew twelvefold to nearly $4.6B. Separate reporting put Anthropic’s computing and infrastructure commitments at $518B over a decade. About 80% is noncancelable or payable regardless of usage. Those obligations will belong to the business public investors are being offered a stake in. Financial reporting, infrastructure commitments

The debate will concentrate on whether Anthropic deserves that valuation. Congress helped change how much of a company’s growth could happen before ordinary investors had a chance to buy its shares.

Microsoft’s 1986 offering priced the company at about $519M, in that year’s dollars. Public shareholders could own it through decades of expansion. They had to recognize the opportunity, take the risk and keep holding. Plenty of other investments disappointed people. But someone with a brokerage account could buy Microsoft while much of the business we know today was still ahead of it. Original prospectus

That opportunity wasn’t simply a gift from generous founders. Rules helped bring companies into public ownership.

In 1996, Congress passed the National Securities Markets Improvement Act. Among its changes, it created a private-fund exemption that removed the existing 100-investor ceiling for funds whose investors met the more demanding “qualified purchaser” standard. Institutions had already been investing in venture capital. The change gave private funds more room to assemble large pools of money. SEC’s contemporary explanation

That mattered to a growing company’s choices. Raising serious money increasingly became possible without selling shares to the public. Research by Michael Ewens and Joan Farre-Mensa identifies the law as one of several changes that expanded late-stage private financing and helped companies stay private longer. Research

Then came the JOBS Act in 2012.

That’s the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act. Somebody in Congress must’ve been very pleased when they got the letters to spell JOBS.

For companies with more than $10M in assets, the old threshold of 500 shareholders of record became 2,000 overall, or 500 who weren’t accredited investors. Qualifying shares issued through employee compensation plans were excluded from the count. A growing workforce could receive equity without pushing the company toward public reporting in the same way. SEC

The old rule required registration and financial reporting, rather than an IPO. But that requirement created pressure: once a company had to disclose its financial results anyway, an important advantage of remaining private had diminished. Goldman Sachs, which helped take Microsoft public, describes the approaching shareholder threshold as a factor in its decision. Goldman Sachs

Private share sales also give employees and early investors ways to turn equity into cash without a listing. Those transactions existed before the JOBS Act. Alongside larger pools of private capital and looser reporting thresholds, they reduce another reason to enter the public market.

The advantages for a company are understandable. Founders gain flexibility. Employees can get paid. Investors can negotiate deals without the full obligations of public ownership.

The consequence for someone building wealth through public stocks deserves equal attention. More of a company’s development can happen within a market they can’t readily enter. By the time an IPO arrives, years of financing rounds have established a much higher starting valuation for their investment.

Some ordinary savers have indirect exposure through pensions or funds. That’s different from being able to choose a company and buy its shares during that earlier period.

“Socialize the losses” is the concern this arrangement brings to mind. An IPO alone doesn’t establish a taxpayer bailout, and private investors have borne real losses along the way. But an offering can broaden who bears the next stage of risk. Where existing owners sell, it can also let them realize gains while new buyers take their place.

The offering’s terms will tell us how much money goes into Anthropic and how much goes to existing shareholders. Calling both “investment in the future” would obscure an important distinction.

Anthropic may build a business that rewards its public shareholders. That possibility doesn’t erase what changed in the meantime. Congress gave companies and private capital more freedom to decide how long early ownership would remain private. Ordinary investors’ access depended on those decisions.

For someone saving out of a paycheck, the March 2025 entry point won’t be available at the IPO. Their decision could begin above $2T, with a decade of computing bills still ahead.

In 1981, an Italian government fell after the exposure of a clandestine Masonic lodge. A published list contained 962 alleged members. Intelligence chiefs, politicians and senior military officers were caught in the scandal. The organization was called Propaganda Due, or P2.¹

A parliamentary inquiry documented P2’s penetration of political, military and economic leadership, and its leader’s control over the newspaper Corriere della Sera.²

A government. Its intelligence services. A major newspaper. Separate institutions, connected through a private organization the public hadn’t known was there. The lesson isn’t simply that powerful people join clubs. It’s that power can be concentrated while the institutions exercising it still look independent.

That’s a different way to read an official biography. The title identifies someone’s public responsibility. It doesn’t necessarily reveal the relationships through which they were recruited, the people whose judgment they trust, or the institutions that helped form their priorities.

American intelligence drew heavily from precisely that kind of established social world. The wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the agency that followed it recruited extensively from the Ivy League, particularly Yale. Historian Robin Winks documented those connections in Cloak and Gown. The new intelligence institutions weren’t assembling their personnel from strangers. They were drawing on relationships that already existed.³

Yale also housed Skull and Bones. In 2004, both major-party presidential candidates, George W. Bush and John Kerry, were members.⁴

The affiliations reach into much older institutions. CIA director William Casey and former secretary of state Alexander Haig were members of the Knights of Malta, formally the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM).⁵

The order traces its origins to an eleventh-century hospital in Jerusalem. It maintains diplomatic relations with more than a hundred states and permanent observer status at the United Nations (UN). A medieval religious order and a modern intelligence agency can appear in the same biography. The job title alone doesn’t show the full set of relationships.⁶

It also issues its own biometric passports. The Order reports roughly 500 diplomatic passports in circulation for its leadership, diplomats and other authorized recipients. It says all 118 of its diplomatic partners accept them as valid travel documents. The Council of the European Union catalogs the passport in its official register, complete with watermarks and security features.⁷⁸

Bohemian Grove shows what a private audience can offer a political career. Richard Nixon called his off-the-record speech there in July 1967 the “first milestone on my road to the presidency.” He also described discussing the coming primaries with Ronald Reagan during that visit. The Grove’s giant owl and ceremonial burning of an effigy called Care are real. So was the opportunity to address influential men away from the public campaign. The ritual attracts attention; the private access explains why it matters.⁹

The policy work has its own institutions. The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) says its War and Peace Studies project produced 670 memoranda for the State Department between 1939 and 1945. David Rockefeller founded the Trilateral Commission in 1973 to bring people from policymaking, business, media and academia into continuing relationships. Private organizations weren’t simply watching government. They were developing advice for it and cultivating relationships across the professions that help explain and evaluate its decisions.¹⁰¹¹

Other arrangements supplied operational muscle. In the late 1970s, the Safari Club brought together Saudi Arabia and partners including France, Egypt and Morocco for covert operations in Africa while Congress was restricting the CIA. Former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal later described their contribution at Georgetown as helping at a time when the United States couldn’t act. Congressional restraint and the capacity to continue operations existed simultaneously, in different parts of the network.¹²

Turki’s name later appeared alongside Peter Thiel’s in SafeGraph’s announcement of a $16 million financing round. Its product was geospatial data about physical places and their relationship to people. WIRED subsequently reported that company materials identified funding from In-Q-Tel (IQT) and an IQT investment executive on SafeGraph’s board. The CIA established IQT in 1999 to connect commercial technology with intelligence requirements. Here, the connection runs through financing and product development, not just a guest list. Intelligence agencies can help shape the technology that later reaches the market.¹³¹⁴¹⁵

The World Economic Forum (WEF) supplied an unusually blunt description of its own ambitions. At Harvard in 2017, Klaus Schwab invoked Angela Merkel, Vladimir Putin and Justin Trudeau while discussing the Forum’s political reach. “We penetrate the cabinets,” he said, referring to its Young Global Leaders. Those names were part of Schwab’s claim, not a verified alumni list. What he chose to celebrate was the presence of people associated with his organization inside national governments.¹⁶¹⁷

These aren’t interchangeable cases. An intelligence investment, a social retreat and P2’s clandestine penetration of state institutions establish different things. But each challenges the habit of treating an official position as the whole story. The question is what the relationship enables: access, recruitment, policy development, financing or the exercise of power beyond the public’s view.

Consider the next policy announced by a government, endorsed by a think tank and welcomed by industry. Three institutional names don’t automatically amount to three independent judgments. Did they arrive separately at the same conclusion, or did the proposal move through relationships they already shared? Who financed the research? Who recruited the advisers? Who gets the contract? Those are questions that records can answer.

The stakes aren’t whether a few officials have unusual hobbies. They’re whether institutions that are supposed to scrutinize one another actually do so. A public asked to accept a consensus deserves to know how independent its authors were. And an election can change the person holding an office without changing the relationships that supply its advice, personnel and capabilities.

Knowing who holds the office isn’t the same as knowing whose influence enters with them.

The president keeps coming back to 1929.

Trump keeps returning to Herbert Hoover. In his July 2 CNBC interview, he said, “I don’t want to be a president with a depression on his resume,” and repeatedly named Hoover as the president he doesn’t want to become. Interview transcript.

Hoover was a Republican, with Republican majorities in both chambers when the Depression began. House history. Banking panics and Federal Reserve mistakes helped deepen the collapse. Congressional party control alone doesn’t explain what happened. Federal Reserve history.

Now Trump promises every adult citizen $5,000 if Republicans keep the House and Senate. Elect Democrats, he says, and the result will be “an economic depression much like 1929.” His own term isn’t on November’s ballot. Oct 3 video.

Five thousand dollars would matter to plenty of households. The appeal doesn’t need explaining.

Read alongside the Hoover remarks, the warning sounds to me like an attempt to assign responsibility for a possible collapse before it happens. He’s named the presidential reputation he wants to avoid. The new clip points to higher taxes, without explaining which tax changes would produce the disaster he’s forecasting.

Day 217. Saudi Arabia is 94 years old and named after a family. Its founder, Abdulaziz ibn Saud, took Riyadh in 1902 with 40 men. For years his lands were a British protectorate, and he drew a British stipend of £5,000 a month. Later the protector was American. (Treaty of Darin; British subsidy; Bitter Lake)

He had at least 22 wives and 45 sons. He took a wife from each tribe he conquered. I’m sure he was a great son-in-law. One wife, Fahda, was the widow of a rival dynasty’s emir. Her son grew up to be King Abdullah. (PBS; Abdullah’s family history)

Every Saudi king since 1953 has been one of the founder’s sons. The first grandson to run the place is Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (“MBS”). Here’s his record.

Eight years ago today, a 15-man Saudi team killed the journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the kingdom’s Istanbul consulate and cut up his body. His remains were never found. US intelligence concluded MBS “approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey to capture or kill” him. He denies ordering it. (US intelligence assessment; RSF)

In 2017 MBS replaced his cousin as crown prince. Five months later, hundreds of princes and businessmen were locked in the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton. The New York Times reported that at least 17 detainees needed hospital treatment for physical abuse. One general died in custody; a witness described his neck as twisted. In 2020 the detainees included that same cousin and MBS’s own uncle, the king’s brother. (Human Rights Watch; Al Jazeera)

As defense minister in 2015 he took the kingdom into Yemen’s war. UNDP estimated the war’s toll would reach 377,000 by the end of 2021, most from hunger, disease and other indirect causes. (UNDP)

Ansarallah governs about 70% of Yemen’s people. This July, after four years of relative calm between it and Riyadh, a Saudi-led strike disabled the runway at Sanaa airport to stop an Iranian plane from landing. People have lived in Sanaa for more than 2,500 years. An Ansarallah official said Riyadh had “dug its own grave.” (AP; World Bank; UNESCO; Ynet)

Since then, Ansarallah has hit Saudi oil facilities and seized Mokha and islands at the entrance to the Red Sea. The kingdom is preparing another offensive. MBS asked Washington for airstrikes. Washington said no, for now. (AP; Reuters)

In July MBS’s half-brother, the energy minister, signed a nuclear agreement with the United States. It doesn’t bar Saudi Arabia from enriching uranium. The administration says it has the safeguards the law requires. MBS told Fox News that if Iran gets a bomb, “we have to get one.” (Department of Energy; Reuters; Al-Monitor)

Iran’s history of statehood reaches back some 2,500 years. Saudi Arabia turned 94 last week. (Britannica)

A Senate vote is expected before Dec 13. Senators: which line of that résumé says trust him with enrichment?

Watch: The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia

FRONTLINE · Oct 1, 2019 · 1 hr 54 min · Correspondent Martin Smith

Day 216. Two Georges hold the Arabian Sea, and a Teddy is on his way.

The George H.W. Bush and George Washington carrier groups are already on station. The Theodore Roosevelt left San Diego on Sunday, and a day behind it came the Makin Island and two more ships carrying about 2,200 Marines and sailors of the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit. It’s a landing force that brings its own stealth jets. (USNI News, Sep 28, 2026; USNI News, Sep 29, 2026)

The metal already out there isn’t small. The Naval Institute’s tracker names 26 American hulls between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, 16 of them in the Arabian Sea, on the doorstep of a strait that carried a fifth of the world’s oil before the war. The Roosevelt’s four escorts add roughly 400 missile tubes. The ships named in USNI’s September 28 regional tracker are drawn to scale below. (USNI fleet tracker; EIA; The War Zone)

If nobody goes home when the Roosevelt arrives, three American carriers will be working the same theater. That happened for eight days in spring 2026, and it was the first time since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. (Al Jazeera, Apr 24, 2026; The War Zone, May 4, 2026)

The unofficial word is “options.” On the record, the Roosevelt is expected to relieve a carrier that’s already there, and a Navy official called the Marines’ sailing a “scheduled deployment.” The Jerusalem Post, reporting the deployment from an unnamed US official, describes the result as “a wider range of options for potential action against Iran.” Arrival estimates differ, so the timing of any overlap remains uncertain. So the Navy is sending a 100,000-ton option with more combat aircraft on its deck than many national air forces own. (Jerusalem Post)

Iran brought a seven-day roadmap to the United Nations: the blockade of its ports lifts, the frozen money moves, and on day seven the strait reopens and the talking starts. Washington’s official answer went back through the mediators and hasn’t been made public. The answer anyone can see is a third carrier and a landing force. In the strait on Thursday, a tanker was burning, hit by a projectile nobody has claimed. (Al Jazeera, Sep 26, 2026; AP via Arab News; UKMTO via Arab Times)

The timing is the tell. TIME asked Trump whether he’d ramp up the bombing after the midterms. “Possible,” he said. And the buildup itself arrived as a leak: at least five outlets on Thursday, every one of them citing officials who wouldn’t be named. You don’t have to trust the messenger to read the message. When Washington wants Tehran to see something, it prints it. Tehran does the same; three senior Iranian officials told Reuters their commanders are reviewing a longer target list. The story is the message. The carrier is the underline. (TIME; AP; Bloomberg; Al Jazeera via Newsquawk; Reuters via Cyprus Mail)

Teddy Roosevelt’s advice was to speak softly and carry a big stick. The ship that bears his name is nicknamed the Big Stick, and it’s crossing the Pacific on behalf of a president who has never once tried speaking softly.

New Mexico has a history with chain reactions. This one comes with lease payments.

A data center is a building that makes money only when the power arrives. Oracle’s New Mexico site, Project Jupiter, learned that the hard way: the 17.8-mile gas pipeline that feeds the plant lost its state right-of-way twice, got rerouted across federal land, and now arrives in February 2027 instead of August 2026 — a longer wait for electrons, and an unchanged stack of bills (CryptoBriefing, Aug 18; Reuters, Sep 24). The building keeps costing whether or not the lights are on. That’s what it means to be the landlord.

Oracle’s the AI boom’s landlord. It borrows like a utility, builds like a developer, and rents compute to the companies having the boom. And the landlord’s problem is old and unforgiving: the rent has to cover the mortgage. Here’s the mortgage. Debt past $125 billion. Free cash flow last year near negative $24 billion. Capital spending that ran $56 billion last fiscal year and $28 billion in the latest quarter alone. And in an SEC filing, $288 billion of lease commitments — nearly all data centers — that start between this quarter and fiscal 2029 and then run 15 to 19 years each, none of it on the balance sheet yet (company filings). In July, S&P cut Oracle to BBB-, one notch above junk. A further downgrade doesn’t just raise the interest bill; it could force some institutional holders to sell, whether they like the AI story or not.

Here’s the rent. Oracle sold $18 billion in bonds in September 2025, the same month a cloud contract with OpenAI worth roughly $300 billion over five years was reported. OpenAI burns cash rather than producing it, reportedly expects to burn $278 billion from 2026 through 2030, and has pushed its listing out of this year (FT via Reuters, Sep 18; Fortune, Sep 12). A lease is a promise about the future, and the future tenant’s still raising the deposit. Bondholders sued in January, saying the full scope of the financing needs wasn’t disclosed when they bought in.

And here’s the meter. On Sep 24, five-year credit default swaps on Oracle traded at 227.5 basis points — a record — meaning it costs $2.28 a year to insure $100 of Oracle debt, more than four times the investment-grade index (Barron’s, Bloomberg data; Reuters). Trading in tech-name CDS reached nearly $650 million in the second quarter, up almost 600% from a year earlier, and in February JPMorgan began selling a basket of swaps on five hyperscalers — Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle — as a standalone product (DTCC; Reuters; CryptoBriefing, Aug 12). Oracle also sent a force majeure notice on Project Jupiter, its flagship build — the clause you invoke when you need the contract to forgive what physics or finance won’t. Look at who got the notice: Blue Owl, the asset manager that owns the developer building Jupiter. Oracle is landlord to OpenAI and tenant to Blue Owl, and this is the tenant asking to defer the higher rent that kicks in once the building is running. Oracle says the project remains on schedule. Ask who’s writing the other side of all that insurance, and you have the only question in this story that matters.

The exposure isn’t one company’s spreadsheet: the five biggest spenders are on pace for combined 2026 capital spending near three-quarters of a trillion dollars, much of it bond-financed, and Alphabet last quarter posted the first negative free cash flow in its 22 years as a public company. The boom’s landlord is leveraged, its biggest tenant is unprofitable, its power is late, and its insurance bill just hit a record.

The boom has a landlord. The landlord has a mortgage. The mortgage doesn’t wait for power.

Open Google Maps, switch to satellite, and go to Rafah. As of this weekend you can. Google quietly replaced its Gaza tiles with imagery from as recently as June 2026, and the internet spent Sunday panning across it.

That took a while. From 1997 to 2020, US law capped commercial satellite imagery of Israel and the Palestinian territories at two meters per pixel. Gaza was a blur on every map app through three wars while Seattle was sharp enough to count cars. The cap lifted, the sharpness arrived, and this is what it shows. (NOAA on the 1997 limit; 2020 notice lifting it)

The UN’s satellite unit puts the damage at 82% of all structures in the Strip, just over 200,000 buildings, and counts 134,422 of them destroyed outright, more than half of everything that stood before the war. From a drone it stops being a percentage. (UNOSAT; UN News, Aug 13, 2026)

I wanted to know whether the worst-hit cities of the Second World War looked like this. They did.

Hamburg had about 1.7M people in 1939. Gaza had 2.1M in 2023, more people in half the space. Operation Gomorrah ran eight days and seven nights in July 1943 and killed somewhere between 34,000 and 40,000; a million people left the city that week. Gaza’s three years have killed 74,000 by the Gaza health ministry’s count, the only running tally there is; the UN uses it, and Israel has never published its own. 1.9M people are displaced. Hamburg’s happened in a week. Gaza’s has run three years, and more than 1,100 people have been killed here since the October 2025 ceasefire. (Hamburg; Gaza · Ground Truth)

The number of destroyed buildings kept climbing after the guns stopped too. The UN says destroyed structures rose 9% after the October 2025 ceasefire, and Al Jazeera’s satellite unit found demolitions in Shujayea, Tuffah and Rafah through mid-December 2025, inside the 58% of the Strip Israel holds behind the yellow line. The IDF says those demolitions fall within the ceasefire and answer active threats, mostly tunnels under buildings and risks to its troops. There’s a Gaza tab at the top of this site, updated daily, and in 213 of these notes I’ve never written about it. The map doesn’t need me to. (UN News; Al Jazeera Sanad, Dec 15, 2025)

The UN Development Programme ran the rubble clearance after the 2009, 2014 and 2021 wars: 2.8M tonnes, all three combined. This war has left 61M tonnes. The agency’s best case for clearing most of it is seven years, and in August 2026 the UN said its partners still lacked the permissions and equipment to remove the unexploded ordnance inside it. (UNDP; UN News, Aug 13, 2026)

More footage

Day 213. One of the places helping sustain America’s war against Iran is this dot in the Indian Ocean.

South of the Maldives, surrounded by an enormous amount of water, there’s an American military base on British-controlled territory.

Of course there is. A country that expects to fight almost anywhere has to spend a great deal of time arranging how to get there.

Britain acquired control of Diego Garcia from France in 1814. The American foothold came through a 1966 agreement with Britain. A 1970 Navy memorandum described the strategy as “stockpiling of islands for contingency use of the U.S.” (House of Lords; Navy memorandum)

Stockpiling islands. Securing useful places before the occasion to use them arrived.

The island’s position mattered to planners concerned about Soviet naval activity and continued access to countries around the Indian Ocean. By 1977, a National Security Council assessment explicitly described its expansion as preparation for circumstances in which coastal facilities became unavailable. (NSC assessment)

Over time, the preparation took physical form.

This war has supplied one of those contingencies. After Iranian attacks badly damaged the Navy’s logistics hub in Bahrain (Navy 5th Fleet HQ), the fleet turned to Diego Garcia, more than 2,000 miles from the carrier forces it was supplying. The distance complicated replenishment, but the alternative hub already existed. (Navy Times)

A 2025 inventory by World BEYOND War counted 877 U.S. foreign military bases and sites. Diego Garcia is one of them.

Presidents inherit all that preparation. Long before a particular crisis arrives, someone has secured access, built the runway and arranged the fuel. Using force becomes an option with an enormous amount of work already behind it.

That readiness can shape the choices we consider. Bombing a distant country starts to feel like an ordinary instrument of policy. The danger is a foreign policy with a hair trigger, because we’ve spent generations making sure the weapon can reach.

Day 212. There’s an unwritten pact between the American television viewer and Sunday football. For about three hours, the nation gets a ceasefire. We mute the culture war and route our collective blood pressure into arguing about defensive pass interference and missed field goals.

The commercials are supposed to honor that. Pickup trucks towing boulders up impossible cliffs. Light beer poured in high-definition slow motion. A gecko trying to save you 15%. Crass consumerism, sure, but harmless. It’s part of the ritual.

Then Fox breaks away from the Seahawks.

In black and white, Donald Trump walks a hallway toward the camera. The voice isn’t pitching low-interest financing. It’s his: “This is the final battle.” “We will cast out the communists, Marxists, and fascists.” “We will rout the fake news media.” If it sounds familiar, it should. The audio echoes his 2023 Veterans Day speech and nearly mirrors a campaign video he posted to Truth Social in January 2024. Your brain waits for the boilerplate: I’m Donald J. Trump, and I approve this message, then a PAC address in Alexandria, Virginia.

But, no, instead, a quiet strip of white text: Paid for by the U.S. Government.

Wait, did that ad just say it was paid for by the government?? The executive branch just ran a stump speech on the public tab between a beer commercial and a punt return. By AdImpact’s count, it’s the third one.

The White House calls it a public service announcement, “educational and unapologetically patriotic.” Defending an earlier spot, a spokesperson laid out the legal theory plainly: “The President is not on the ballot and the ads don’t have a call to action.” By that logic, a recycled campaign speech sits in the same civic drawer as Smokey Bear and a Medicare enrollment reminder.

It takes contempt to say that with a straight face. It also takes the wrong rulebook. “On the ballot” and “call to action” are campaign-finance tests, the magic-words standard that governs PACs and outside spenders. They don’t govern how an agency spends its appropriation.

The spending rule dates to 1951, when Congress began adding this restriction to appropriations bills: no appropriated money for “publicity or propaganda purposes” it hasn’t authorized. GAO reads that rider narrowly, and it’s flagged administrations of both parties under it. The test is whether the government is informing the public or promoting itself. A stump speech with no program, no deadline and no phone number isn’t informing anyone. It’s the self-aggrandizement the rule was written for, five weeks before a midterm.

The Washington Post reports more than $300,000 spent on “Final Battle,” citing AdImpact. Campaigns are paid for by people who choose to give. The government is paid for by everyone: the fan who reveres the man, the one who reviles him, and the one who just wanted to watch the game.

A ship paid $5.3M to secure a passage through the Panama Canal earlier this month. That was the auction premium for a reservation, on top of the ordinary toll. The gas carrier G. Spirit made its crossing on Sep 1. (Reuters, Reuters column)

The Iran war helps explain the demand. Disrupted Gulf shipping has pushed more energy cargoes toward Panama, where low rainfall has constrained the freshwater supply the locks depend on. A route that offers relief from one crisis has limits of its own. (Reuters)

Panama also has a history worth keeping beside those shipping figures. The U.S. invaded on Dec 20, 1989, and removed Manuel Noriega. We already operated the canal. Its transfer to Panama, agreed under the 1977 treaties, wasn’t completed until Dec 31, 1999. (Army history, Canal Authority)

My film recommendation tonight is The Panama Deception, the 1992 documentary that won the 1993 Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. It examines the invasion’s civilian consequences and challenges the government’s explanation and American media coverage. With so much of today’s war discussed through the security of shipping routes, I think there’s value in revisiting what an American intervention looked like to the people living beside one.

Watch: The Panama Deception

Play the official trailer · 3:36 · The Empowerment Project

Preview image: El Chorrillo after the invasion, Panama, December 1989. Photo: Julio Cesar Guerra D., via The Empowerment Project.

Day 210. Tucker Carlson says he went to the Oval Office days before the Iran war began to argue against it. In an interview NPR published September 24, he told Steve Inskeep that he’d warned the conflict would serve Israel’s regional ambitions at the expense of America’s position in the Gulf.

Carlson described three aims he believed Israel was pursuing:

1. Establish regional dominance by removing Iran as a competing power and leaving it consumed by internal conflict.
2. Weaken the six Gulf Cooperation Council states, whose growing power he viewed as a challenge to Israel’s position.
3. Drive the United States out of the region, including eliminating American bases, because he argued that the US presence constrained Israel’s ambitions.

Carlson recalls Trump’s answer:

“Yes, you’re right. But in the end we all die anyway, so it doesn’t matter.”

Carlson says he pressed him about their children, grandchildren and the country’s future, and got no substantive answer.

NPR says the White House didn’t address the exchange specifically when asked for comment. Instead, it supplied a Trump social media post attacking Carlson and other critics and accusing them of wanting Iran to have a nuclear weapon.

“Yes, you’re right.” That’s the part I keep coming back to. In Carlson’s account, Trump accepts all three points, including that the war would weaken America’s position in the region.

What explains that acceptance? Did Netanyahu have leverage over him, or did Trump share the objectives Carlson was warning him about? Why would he hear that argument and agree to proceed?

And then this: “But in the end we all die anyway, so it doesn’t matter.”

Britain’s chief of the defence staff, Sir Richard Knighton, says more families will come to know what sacrifice for the nation means. The language of preparation is becoming familiar: duty, readiness, resolve. The public is being asked to get used to the possibility of war with Russia.

Sir Richard Knighton

Chief of the Defence Staff

RUSI · 15 December 2025

I can’t get used to it. The confidence of the language bears so little relationship to the consequences being contemplated.

Consider Oreshnik, Russia’s ballistic missile already used against Ukraine. A rocket carries multiple reentry vehicles on an arc through space before their payloads descend at hypersonic speed. One launch delivers multiple incoming objects. The speed compresses the time available to respond; the multiplicity complicates interception.

The United States once explored a weapon concept nicknamed “Rods from God”: dense metal projectiles released from orbit, striking with such speed that they wouldn’t need explosives to cause destruction. That idea helps explain the interest in Oreshnik’s non-nuclear payload. The missile launches from the ground, but its descending projectiles carry destructive energy in their motion.

This is the machinery behind the word “conventional.” It’s a classification, not a promise that the damage will be manageable.

Missile defense introduces another uncomfortable question. How long can it last? Every engagement consumes interceptors. Launchers have finite magazines, stockpiles have limits, and replacement missiles take time to manufacture and deliver. Even perfect interception wouldn’t resolve that arithmetic. A defense that stops one salvo still has to stop the next.

That’s before considering the reliability of the interceptions themselves. MIT professor emeritus Theodore Postol estimates that Patriot PAC-3’s success against Iranian ballistic missiles has been only a few percent. His assessment raises a fundamental question about how much protection these systems actually provide.

What’s the plan for sustaining that protection through a direct war with Russia?

The consequences extend beyond military installations. Electricity, fuel storage, railways, communications, and water treatment sustain civilian life. Damage to those systems spreads beyond the point of impact. Repairing them during continuing attacks becomes part of the war.

NATO would retaliate. Russia would respond. Each round would produce losses, demands for escalation, and another decision about how far to go. Nuclear weapons would remain available throughout.

What I can’t make sense of is the purpose of all this. Surely the people preparing these speeches know what a direct war with Russia would involve. They have military advisers, intelligence briefings, and information the rest of us don’t. They know there would be retaliation. They know the consequences could escape their control.

So what are they trying to accomplish?

Is the language meant to frighten Russia into backing down? Frighten Europeans into accepting higher military spending and sacrifices at home? Prepare the public for a confrontation officials genuinely expect? Those are different purposes, with very different implications for everyone being told to get ready.

The talk about duty and dying for your country is shocking. But underneath that reaction is real confusion. It’s difficult to believe these governments actually want the war they’re describing. It’s equally difficult to understand why they’re working so hard to make it feel inevitable.

What are we being prepared for?

After the 2008 crash, I started to believe the United States could borrow forever. Maybe the debt didn’t matter. ZIRP—zero interest rate policy—kept the Fed’s benchmark near zero through 2015, then again from 2020 to early 2022.

But financial confidence also rests on power. In January, U.S. forces seized Nicolás Maduro and his wife with CIA inside help. Washington later announced 100-year oil concessions and a 35% federal stake in the concession holder’s parent company. Rights to future Venezuelan oil income can become collateral for loans on American banks’ books. Another country’s resources become an American financial opportunity.

Maduro’s capture must’ve felt like an old formula working again. Mohammad Mossadegh’s government nationalized Iran’s oil industry in 1951, taking over the Iranian operations of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company—today’s BP. In 1953, America’s CIA and Britain’s MI6 helped overthrow him. Hundreds died, but no Americans. Eisenhower wrote that it sounded “more like a dime novel than an historical fact.”

If $1 million could buy off a Venezuelan official or military insider, that’d be cheap beside the cost of missile defense. U.S. crews protecting bases in West Asia can fire two PAC-3 (Patriot) interceptors at one incoming ballistic missile to improve the chances of a hit. At the Army’s 2026 budgeted PAC-3 MSE cost, that’s roughly $7.7 million trying to stop a single missile. An insider might help secure a cooperative government. The interceptors don’t purchase Iran’s submission.

The U.S. and Israel assassinated Iran’s supreme leader. Iran kept resisting. I don’t believe Washington will secure Venezuela’s submission in Iran. Disruption at Hormuz is feeding inflation and raising borrowing costs, including the cost of financing the war itself.

The chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 should’ve challenged our assumptions about what American power could guarantee. I’m watching bonds because those assumptions reach into our finances. Loans backed by future income become vulnerable when the political arrangements producing it start to fail. The risk I see is Washington borrowing to finance both the war and the financial losses it leaves behind.

The Terraces

Day 207. I was watching two discussions about Ansarallah, which governs about 70% of Yemen’s population, and its conflict with Saudi Arabia when the photographs caught my attention. World Bank · April 2026

When I hear Saudi Arabia, I almost always picture desert. Yemen lies just to its south, across borderlands the two countries fought over and disputed for decades before reaching a settlement in 2000. I hadn’t pictured green terraces curving around steep mountains, with villages perched above them. Parts of Yemen looked more like Hawaii or Jamaica. Sana’a Center

Yemen’s western mountains rise beyond 10,000 feet. Seasonal winds, including the summer monsoon, bring moist air against their slopes. Forced upward, that air cools, forming clouds and rain. Generations of farmers have built stone terraces to hold the soil and slow the water’s passage downhill, giving it time to soak into their fields. Some cultivated strips are barely a metre wide. World Bank’s climate assessment · FAO’s field assessment

Those terraces are the work of generations, and families still depend on them. Giving up that land would mean giving up their fields, their livelihoods and the life they’ve built around them. Looking at those mountains, I can understand why people would fight to stay. In Haraz, villages were built on rocky heights both for defense and to leave more room for cultivation. Their sandstone and basalt houses blend into the mountain, with fields stepping down below them. Yemen’s UNESCO submission

Coffee grows in those terraced highlands too, which brings us to Mokha. Arabica’s wild home is in Ethiopia and South Sudan. Yemen became an early center of cultivation and a major source of the coffee traded abroad. Mokha, the port on Yemen’s Red Sea coast, became so closely associated with that trade that its name followed the beans around the world. The “mocha” on a café menu carries that history. Kew · FAO

I remember Eritrea from church.

Growing up at Sammamish Hills Lutheran, I remember collections and fundraisers for people in a country I knew almost nothing about. The details faded. The name stayed.

This week, seeing Eritrea in the news again, I finally asked the question that never occurred to me as a kid: why did a Lutheran church outside Seattle care about Eritrea?

The answer goes back to 1866, when Swedish Lutheran missionaries landed at Massawa on the Red Sea. They meant to push on into Ethiopia. Unrest changed their plans, so they stayed and built missions in what’s now Eritrea. Over generations, those connections grew into congregations, schools, clinics and relationships that later helped carry humanitarian relief.

My family has Swedish roots. So a childhood memory from a church near Seattle turns out to have a history stretching across continents and back more than a century. I still haven’t found the particular fundraiser I remember. But the connection makes sense.

Now Washington’s got its own renewed interest in Eritrea, and the timing deserves attention.

For months, we’ve watched attacks on American bases in the Gulf expose the vulnerability of a military presence built over decades. Buildings damaged or destroyed. Personnel evacuated. Questions about what can be rebuilt, what can be defended, and where forces might have to operate instead. The geography that once helped the United States project power has become a source of exposure.

Against that backdrop, look at the opening toward Eritrea. The United States has lifted sanctions on the country’s military and ruling party. Officials have been discussing closer relations, including security cooperation. A government Washington sanctioned is now a government Washington’s courting.

Eritrea’s coastline faces Saudi Arabia and Yemen across the Red Sea. Its ports sit beside some of the most consequential shipping lanes in the world. The UAE previously used Assab to move troops and heavy equipment into Yemen.

There’s no confirmed American basing agreement in the reporting I’ve found. But you don’t need a signed lease to recognize why Washington’s interested.

Meanwhile, Britain’s agreed to provide aerial refuelling for Saudi aircraft responding to Houthi attacks. The problems around these waterways keep drawing in more countries, more resources and more commitments.

As existing positions become harder to defend, the search for alternatives can pull more places into the war. Moving the footprint doesn’t necessarily reduce the conflict. It can spread the commitments needed to sustain it.

Put these developments together and the question gets bigger than Eritrea: what’s the plan for making all of this smaller?

Every new commitment arrives with its own explanation. Protect the shipping. Support the partner. Keep the route open. Answer the latest attack. Find somewhere safer to operate. Each move has an immediate justification. Together, they deserve an explanation of where they lead.

A government should be able to say how its next military commitment brings the end of a war closer. It should tell the public what success requires, what obligations it’s taking on, and what happens if the next move produces another crisis that needs another response. We’re entitled to ask while the decisions are still being made.

Eritrea caught my eye because I’d heard the name in a very different setting, decades ago. What started as a childhood memory led me through Swedish missionary history and back to a country that powerful governments are once again weighing for its location.

A coastline that looks useful from Washington is somebody’s home. Any bargain over access, security or influence carries consequences for people who may have very little say in it.

The map keeps growing. Where’s the plan to bring the war to an end?

Day 205. After the financial crisis, institutional investors bought foreclosed homes in bulk and turned them into rentals. The Government Accountability Office identified a crucial advantage: they could raise capital while mortgage lenders were pulling back. The conditions that cost families their homes gave well-financed buyers an opening. GAO

A crisis doesn’t leave everyone standing in the same place. Someone who needs to sell to stay afloat faces a different economy from someone with cash and time to buy. Falling prices can destroy a household’s savings while making the assets it once owned more accessible to somebody else.

That history is part of why I’m increasingly dissatisfied with incompetence as a complete explanation for this war. Decisions that look disastrous from where most people sit may be acceptable—even desirable—to some of the people with influence over them.

The danger to Hormuz was understood beforehand. In March, the director of national intelligence told the Senate that Iran using the strait as leverage had long been an intelligence assessment. Foreseeable risks were accepted. Understanding that choice means examining how its supporters weighed the costs, including costs they wouldn’t personally bear. Senate testimony

There’s a difference between taking advantage of a crisis and helping create or prolong one. The first is well documented in our economic history. Establishing the second means tracing decisions, money and influence; the outcome alone won’t do it.

For this war, I want to follow the people and institutions that supported the policies, the risks they expected to bear, and the opportunities they stood to gain. Their interests belong in the explanation of how these decisions were made.

I’m keeping the receipts.

Day 204. Air Force Secretary Troy Meink said Monday that the United States already has “on-orbit space control weapons.” Asked to elaborate, he answered, “No.” He explained that the phrase had been carefully chosen, then described the need to protect American space capabilities against threats from other countries. Conference transcript

Watch: Inside the Pentagon’s Black Budget | Cappy Army

The money behind classified space programs is poised to grow sharply. Space Force’s FY2027 budget request includes $17.33B for classified research and development, up from $6.56B in the FY2026 column of the same table. That’s a proposed increase of 164%. About 43% of its requested R&D funding sits under the label “Classified Programs.” The table doesn’t identify the individual projects or connect that increase to the weapons Meink described. Pentagon budget

Meink’s security argument deserves consideration. A military that depends on satellites needs ways to protect them. Revealing a weapon’s capabilities could help an adversary defeat it. But that leaves a substantial part of the discussion outside the engineering: what Washington intends these weapons to accomplish, what limits govern their use, and how another country might interpret an action described here as defensive.

The public has now been told that American weapons are already in orbit. It deserves an explanation of what would justify using them, and how Washington intends to keep a confrontation there from becoming a wider war. Those questions shouldn’t have to wait for the first use.

Day 203. October’s diesel supply is being squeezed now. The Saudi pipeline attack has disrupted crude deliveries that European refineries were counting on for next month. Oil that doesn’t arrive can’t become diesel. Those lost cargoes have to be replaced, or the refineries have to cut production.

Some late-September cargoes to European refiners were cancelled or pushed into November. Bloomberg reported Friday that Aramco told at least two European customers they’d receive no October crude under their term contracts. The disruption reaches into the fuel those refineries were supposed to produce in October.

Russia has restricted diesel exports to protect its domestic market. I want to know what an American restriction would accomplish: how much fuel would stay here, whether it could reach the businesses that need it, and how quickly. That deserves a public answer now.

Higher diesel prices take money out of every business buying the fuel. High profits for oil companies won’t pay a farmer’s fuel bill or a builder’s equipment costs. A trucking company buying 200 gallons pays another $200 for every dollar added to the pump price, before it earns another dollar moving freight.

Day 202. Thomas Massie (R-KY) spent an hour on the House floor Wednesday answering House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), who had accused Massie of “not participating as a full member of the Congress.” The entire speech was extemporaneous.

Massie talked about Epstein, the Iran war, prices, debt, health care, campaign money and committee assignments. His charge was simple and scathing: voters elect the members, but party leaders decide who gets committee seats and what Congress gets to debate and vote on. Members who cooperate are rewarded. Members who force unwanted votes can be stopped by canceling Congress and declaring recess.

On Sep 1, Johnson called Massie’s prediction of an early recess “stupid” and said Republicans would work every day on the published calendar, “so long as people like him don’t stop the progress.”

Two days later, Johnson did exactly as Massie predicted and canceled the final two weeks of September voting.

Massie filed impeachment articles against Pete Hegseth on Sep 15. The next day, Johnson canceled the House’s last scheduled voting day. The House left without addressing them.

Johnson says the government is funded through Dec 11, the Senate hasn’t moved its budget plan and the House has done its job. It hasn’t voted on either matter. The House isn’t scheduled to vote again until Nov 9 unless Johnson calls it back.

Massie’s prediction was “stupid” for two days.

Saudi Arabia is having a tough week.

The kingdom led a military intervention in Yemen in 2015, with American intelligence and logistical support.

Today, Ansarallah, the Houthi movement, holds islands at the mouth of Bab el-Mandeb and the ground overlooking the shipping lane. Retreating Saudi-backed forces abandoned a sizeable stock of advanced American- and Saudi-supplied weapons, which the Houthis captured. A diplomat told Reuters the group had quietly assembled about 100,000 fighters and that “everyone, including the Saudis, missed this build-up.”

This week the group released footage of what it says is a Saudi F-15 shot down over Marib. Riyadh hasn’t acknowledged losing one.

The Saudis have reason to worry. The Iran-aligned movement has fired missiles at Saudi cities and now holds territory overlooking a major oil shipping lane.

So the Saudi government is asking for outside military help again. Two Western officials told Reuters that neither the U.S. nor European countries are prepared to directly back a counteroffensive. MBS went to Cairo seeking an Egyptian role. Egypt’s Foreign Ministry didn’t respond to Reuters’ request for comment.

The Mecca Joint Defense Agreement, signed Aug 7 with Türkiye and Pakistan, says an armed attack on one is an attack on all. An unnamed Saudi source told Israel’s Channel 12 how that’s gone so far: “From Pakistan or Turkey nothing came except statements, and there was no cooperation. They only want to sell weapons.”

Apparently, Ansarallah is a "Pre-Existing Condition."

Day 200. This website exists because two things happened the same week. The Iran war started, and I wanted to see whether a tax accountant who didn’t know how to code could build one.

Everyone was talking about vibe-coding and I wanted to try something. On the day the strikes began, I spent hours on World Monitor, refreshing the global situation board like it owed me money. It even monitors the pizza places around the Pentagon, on the theory that if they’re suddenly swamped late at night, something’s about to go down. My close friends were worried (probably still are). World Monitor was useful, but it wasn’t built around the questions I had or the things I’d already read.

I’m not sure Four Fingers News is any more useful, but I’ve learned a lot building it. I run it myself, with help from a process I mostly understand.

Some parts work better than others. The visitor counter froze at 39 in July and stayed there until I noticed in August. Nobody wrote in. The Iran cost tracker is still carrying numbers from July. I’ll fix it later. My wife keeps reminding me this is a choice and nobody asked me to do it (I’m aware).

I knew the Iran war, or whatever we’re calling it, wasn’t going to be over in “days” or “weeks,” but honestly I didn’t expect to hit Day 200.

Day 199. Muawiya I (c. 602–680), who ruled from Damascus as the first Umayyad caliph, is remembered for describing politics as a single strand of hair stretched between himself and the people he governed. When they pulled, he loosened his end. When they loosened, he pulled. A strand could carry tension, but only if neither side insisted on winning every inch.

In a new interview, Chas Freeman — a retired career diplomat who served as U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia during Desert Shield and Desert Storm — reached for that image. Freeman applied it to adversaries: diplomatic contact isn’t an endorsement or a reward for good behavior. It’s the line that lets governments apply pressure, sense resistance and give ground before the relationship snaps.

That’s useful context for a meeting that was supposed to happen today in Salalah. Iran had called regional foreign ministers together to discuss the Iran-Oman shipping arrangement. They didn’t meet. Saudi Arabia submitted amendments, and Oman postponed the gathering “in the interests of consensus.”

Seen through Muawiya’s metaphor, postponement is the diplomacy. Muscat felt the line tighten and loosened its end before the meeting could snap it. The test comes next: whether Saudi Arabia and Iran use the room Oman created to keep hold of the same strand.

Day 198. I've been following the story of “Dude 44” since the beginning. For months, I've checked for updates almost every day, not because I doubted there were American servicemen in danger, and certainly not because I wanted anything bad to happen to them. I kept checking because I couldn't shake the feeling that we were all being directed to focus on the wrong part of the story.

This weekend, 60 Minutes finally aired its interview with Bravo, the Air Force officer who spent nearly two days on the ground in Iran before being rescued. It's a compelling interview. Bravo endured something few of us can imagine, and the newly released rescue footage answers questions that had lingered for months. It answered almost none of the questions I'd been asking about the larger operation.

The interview asks us to admire the rescue. I never needed convincing that the rescue was extraordinary. If anything, watching what those pararescuemen and special operators accomplished only increased my respect for them. They did exactly what we expect America's military to do when one of its own is stranded behind enemy lines.

What I still don't understand is why they had to do it. How did an American F-15E end up shot down deep inside Iran? What was the larger operation? What strategic objective justified putting that aircraft there? What succeeded? What failed? What did the United States actually accomplish? Those are the questions that matter, yet they're barely addressed.

Instead, we've spent months immersed in a different narrative. We heard about Easter weekend. We heard about miracles. We heard about “Dude 44 Alpha” and “Dude 44 Bravo.” We heard about impossible odds, incredible courage, and what officials described as a rescue involving more than 150 aircraft. Pete Hegseth compared the story to the resurrection of Christ, then later recited a Pentagon prayer adapted from Pulp Fiction. It's an unforgettable story. It's just not the story I've been trying to understand.

A rescue isn't a strategy. It's what happens after a strategy has already placed people in extraordinary danger. Celebrating the rescue while ignoring the operation that made the rescue necessary feels like congratulating firefighters for pulling someone from a burning building while refusing to ask how the fire started. That's not a criticism of the firefighters. It's a recognition that they weren't the cause of the crisis.

The same is true here. Bravo deserves every ounce of respect he's receiving. So do the men and women who brought him home. Nothing in this diminishes what they accomplished. But courage on the battlefield doesn't answer questions about judgment in Washington.

As I watched the interview, I kept waiting for someone to pull the camera back. Not literally, but strategically. I wanted someone to stop asking what Bravo was thinking in those mountains and start asking what American policymakers were thinking before his aircraft ever crossed into Iran. Maybe those answers are still classified. Maybe they genuinely can't be discussed. Or maybe the rescue story became the story because it's the version everyone can rally around without having to wrestle with the much larger questions.

If that's the case, then we've mistaken the most emotional part of the story for the most important part. Bravo survived. That's something every American should be grateful for.

Now tell us why he was there.

Saudi Arabia’s main escape route around Hormuz is shut.

The East-West pipeline had been carrying four to five million barrels a day across the kingdom to the Red Sea. That’s roughly 4–5% of global oil supply. Saudi authorities closed it as a precaution after a drone attack. Meanwhile, the Houthis have seized Perim island at the Red Sea’s southern entrance.

Riyadh asked Washington for direct military help against the Houthis. Reuters reports that Washington offered intelligence and targeting assistance but declined direct action for now.

Yesterday’s note traced the relationship between Saudi oil and American protection. Here’s where that relationship meets a practical test: the kingdom needs to get its oil to customers, and its available routes keep getting more vulnerable.

Into that situation comes Iran’s proposed shipping arrangement with Oman. Pezeshkian says Arab ministers will meet Monday to sign it; Oman hadn’t immediately confirmed the meeting in Anadolu’s report. An Iranian security official says Tehran would control the corridor’s entrance and exit.

That’s a claim to power over the neighbors’ trade.

Getting tankers moving again would bring real relief. The terms could also require Gulf governments to accept authority they’ve spent decades trying to keep Iran from acquiring.

No such settlement has been established. But that’s the significance of these negotiations. An Iranian veto over its neighbors’ exports would change the region’s balance of power long after the damaged pipeline is repaired.

Twenty-five years ago today, 19 men seized four airliners. Three hit buildings. The fourth went into a field in Pennsylvania because the people on board fought back. 2,977 people died.

The story we settled on was terrorism. A cave, a madman, a hatred of freedom.

Calling it terrorism doesn't explain how we got there.

A better starting point is February 1945, aboard the Navy cruiser USS Quincy, anchored on the Great Bitter Lake in the Suez Canal. A dying Franklin Roosevelt sat across from King Ibn Saud.

They signed a memo of the conversation, mostly about Palestine. There's no oil-for-protection clause. The broader understanding took shape over the next decade. America gets the oil. The House of Saud gets protection. What happens inside the kingdom is the royal family's business.

At home, the Saudis kept a bargain older than the United States. Since 1744, through two collapses and a reconquest, the Saudi family has ruled with the blessing of the Wahhabi clerics. The family holds the sword, the clerics hold the pulpit. Protect one and you protect both.

The export of that creed started before the money did. The Muslim World League was founded in 1962.

Then came 1973. Oil went from $3 to nearly $12 in a matter of months, and a modest missionary project became one of the best-funded religious movements in the world.

Riyadh spent tens of billions of dollars over the next three decades on mosques, schools and charities from Lahore to Sarajevo to Brooklyn. Not all of them preached the same thing. Plenty taught a narrow, brittle version of the faith. And the 9/11 Commission found that some of them became cover for people with worse intentions.

In 1979 gunmen seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca. The royal family responded by giving the clerics even more control over Saudi life.

That same year the Soviets went into Afghanistan. Washington and Riyadh split the bill for the Afghan resistance, dollar for dollar. America called it anticommunism. The Saudis called it religious duty.

The Arab volunteers who joined the fighting had their own networks and raised their own money. American aid mostly didn't reach them. Saudi private donors helped support them.

Osama bin Laden was one of those volunteers.

Wahhabism alone didn't produce him. The Saudi state clerics preached obedience and later condemned him by name. He drew on Saudi money and Saudi piety, but also on the revolutionary ideas that came out of Egypt's prisons. Muslim Brotherhood exiles brought those ideas into the kingdom, where Riyadh hired them to staff its universities in the 1960s and 70s.

He had a long list of grievances. When he declared war on the United States in 1996, the one in the title was American troops in the land of the two holy places.

Which is to say the Bitter Lake arrangement helped build the ideology and then handed it a target.

That doesn't require a conspiracy. For 56 years, both governments had reasons to keep the kingdom's domestic affairs largely out of the discussion.

That's harder to reckon with than a man in a cave. The story runs through 12 presidents of both parties, the Afghan program, and a relationship that's still the spine of American strategy in the Gulf.

Which brings us back to this week.

Saudi Arabia's watching the Houthis advance along the Red Sea. Hormuz is choked. Axios reports MBS called Trump twice Thursday to ask for American strikes on Yemen.

The same kingdom stripped its religious police of arrest powers in 2016. The prince has been clipping the clerics ever since. Whatever his reasons, the country that funded the export is now trying to change the product.

That meeting was 81 years ago. Roosevelt and Ibn Saud are long dead.

Their successors have updated the relationship plenty of times. Last November it got a fresh defense agreement with a price tag attached.

I don't think we've reckoned with what that relationship helped set in motion.

Day 195.

Ansarallah has taken Mocha.

Saudi-backed PLC forces are falling back toward Dhubab, on the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. Houthi forces have also reached the Hanish Islands.

This isn’t another drone strike. It’s a territorial defeat for the Saudi-backed government.

And the timing could hardly be worse.

Hormuz is already badly constrained. Saudi Arabia’s alternative is to move oil west to the Red Sea. Now the force it spent a decade trying to destroy is advancing toward the southern exit of that sea.

Saudi Arabia bombed Yemen for years. The United States armed it. The Houthis survived.

Now they’re advancing, Saudi cities are again being struck, and Riyadh is watching the war move toward a chokepoint it can’t afford to lose.

Iran is supposed to be isolated.

Instead, the conflict is spreading outward from Iran into the Gulf, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and the Red Sea.

Washington may still have overwhelming military power.

But power and control aren’t the same thing.

Right now, control is getting harder to find.

Day 194. Seattle has a particular way of welcoming people. Tonight, it involved falling behind New England, losing our starting quarterback, and making everyone wait until the final seconds to breathe. Seahawks 13, Patriots 10. Three fourth-quarter interceptions. Welcome, Khoslas. This is sometimes how we relax. AP

If you’re celebrating the win while wondering who exactly just bought the team, here’s the introduction.

The Khosla family’s ownership group closed its $9.612 billion purchase on September 3. Vinod Khosla is the chair, his wife Neeru is the controlling owner, and their son Neal is vice chair. That’s the family taking over from Paul Allen’s estate, at the highest price ever paid for an NFL franchise. Reuters

Their story comes through India and Silicon Valley. Vinod grew up in an Indian Army household and studied electrical engineering in Delhi before coming to the United States for graduate school at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford. He co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982, became an investor at Kleiner Perkins, and started Khosla Ventures in 2004. His fortune grew out of building technology companies and backing others, with investments spanning computing, energy, healthcare, and artificial intelligence. Khosla Ventures

Neeru brings a different background. Raised in India and England, she studied molecular biology and co-founded the nonprofit CK-12 Foundation, which provides free educational resources. She’ll also lead the Seahawks Charitable Foundation. There’s a meaningful opportunity there to make the family’s arrival matter to children who may never get a ticket to Lumen Field. Biography, CK-12

Neal helped drive the family’s interest in buying the team. His mother credits his enthusiasm for football and desire to get involved. The family also arrives with previous ties to the 49ers, which I’m willing to treat as a correctable error in judgment. Introductory remarks

They’ve already announced white throwback uniforms for 2027. Somebody’s doing the homework. Announcement

Of course, the Allen name means something here. Paul helped keep the Seahawks in Seattle. Jody carried that stewardship forward after his death. The new owners are inheriting decades of attachment that no purchase agreement can fully describe. The ownership transition

I hope the Khoslas enjoy getting to know this place. Show up. Listen. Invest in the team and trust the people who know football. Let the community work become something families can point to.

Tonight, we got a win and a reason to introduce ourselves. Welcome to the neighborhood, Khoslas. Cheers to a good start. Go Hawks.

Day 193. Yesterday I wrote about my grandpa Harold and the life he built after World War II. Today I listened to Peter Pajakowski talk about his son Nigel, an Air Force staff sergeant who died at 24.

In a conversation with Daniel Davis, Peter Pajakowski describes Nigel, an Air Force staff sergeant who loved his work, his colleagues and the opportunities service had given him. He also describes isolation, repeatedly delayed homecomings and a growing struggle to reconcile what Nigel believed in with what he believed his country was doing.

Those feelings weren’t mutually exclusive. That’s the part worth sitting with.

We ask young Americans to develop judgment, integrity and a sense of responsibility. Their convictions don’t switch off when the mission becomes difficult to explain. For someone who joined partly to find purpose, questioning that purpose can reach well beyond a disagreement about policy.

Nigel died by suicide after returning from deployment, according to the discussion. His father explicitly resists reducing his death to one event or one explanation. His account deserves that same care from anyone repeating it.

It also deserves more than being absorbed into an argument about which side supports the troops. A person can remain devoted to the people beside him while struggling profoundly with the work they’ve been asked to do.

Yesterday’s note looked across the decades Harold had after the Navy. Nigel’s father describes the conversations he’d expected to have when his son came home.

Day 192. My grandpa Harold Grigsby Johnson would’ve been 103 years old today. September 7 is also Labor Day this year, which makes the uniform only the beginning of his story.

Left: Harold G. Johnson in his Navy uniform with his father, John Johnson. Right, from left: Tisinger, Stunkard, Mitchell and Harold. Family photos.

He left Washington State College for the Navy during World War II, served with the Amphibious Forces in the Asiatic-Pacific Theater and graduated from the Navy Midshipmen’s School at Columbia. Afterward he returned to college, spent 49 years at Aberdeen Federal and Anchor Bank, and served on the school board and through the YMCA, Red Cross, Lions Club and church.

World War II was neither clean nor simple, but the country acknowledged it as a national undertaking. Congress declared it, millions mobilized and a formal surrender marked its end.

Young Americans still stand watch on ships and at bases around the world. Today they’re carrying Day 192 of a war Congress hasn’t authorized, while most civilian life proceeds without having to call it a war. What’s changed sits with the country behind them: we’ve become less willing to say what we’re asking them to do, or what would let the mission end.

Most of Harold’s life came after the war. The people serving now are still at the beginning of theirs.

Tonight, a Manhattan for Harold.

Day 191. Two American warships targeted. Three Iranian oil tankers struck. Washington’s latest explanation of the war comes with a ratio. Admiral Brad Cooper says attacks on two U.S. ships will be answered by taking out three Iranian vessels. CENTCOM says no American personnel were harmed. CENTCOM

Iran says it hit the warships. The damage is disputed. The question that survives either account: what happens when an exchange produces a result neither government can comfortably absorb?

There’s no stable exchange rate between a tanker and an aircraft carrier. You can count hulls. You can’t calculate in advance the political consequences of hundreds of dead sailors, an oil terminal burning, or commercial crews deciding the next voyage isn’t worth their lives. Announcing the price of retaliation doesn’t mean you control what the other side does after paying it.

CENTCOM’s statement contains an extraordinary sentence about the Iranian tankers: “Iran has no means by which to defend them.” The vulnerability of the targets is presented as an American advantage. But the ability to destroy another ship leaves the central question unanswered: how does this get us out of the war? CENTCOM

The same problem applies to reopening Hormuz. A successful passage gets a ship through. Restoring a trade route requires enough confidence to book the next voyage, insure it, crew it, and do it again next month. Every new exchange gives everyone involved another reason to reconsider. A naval escort can accompany a tanker. It can’t order its owner to believe the danger has passed.

That’s the danger in measuring success one exchange at a time. Each round can produce a favorable military report while making the next round harder to escape.

Two of ours. Three of yours.

The arithmetic works until the bill arrives.