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Something very strange is going on. Iran is negotiating its surrender. The war is over and Iran has lost.. I have been assured that the United States has destroyed Iran's ability of their proxies to project power in the Middle East.
Yet somehow, despite this war goal being accomplished and the war being over, Saudi Arabia is still being attacked by Iran's Proxies..
At least 12 people were killed and over 300 injured in a Houthi missile attack on King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh on Saturday, October 10, 2026. This marks the third strike on the facility in one week and the deadliest attack in a Gulf Arab country since the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran began in February.
In response, President Donald Trump stated the U.S. is considering joining Saudi Arabia’s military campaign against the Houthis, while the U.S. Embassy issued a security alert urging American citizens to avoid the Riyadh airport.
So to summarize, it looks like the war is expanding, Iran's proxies continue to be able to strike US allies, and Iran's proxies are escalating the conflict instead of backing down.
With early voting opening up soon for many states, what are the chances Iran has an October surprise in store for Trump? Trump has stated that the U.S. will not resume military strikes on Iran before the November 3, 2026 (midterm election). The U.S. military is deploying roughly 9,000 to 10,000 additional troops to the Middle East, including the USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group and the USS Makin Island amphibious readiness group, which departed San Diego on October 4–5, 2026. This surge brings the total U.S. military presence in the region to over 60,000 personnel and establishes three aircraft carrier strike groups in the theater for the first time since April 2026.
So Iran knows that Trump wants the Iran War to quiet down before the Midterms, but he is preparing to escalate once it is over. Why would they play along with this? I believe there is a good chance they will escalate and cause Trump and Republicans political embarrassment soon. But maybe this doesn't matter, because for some reason, the Houthis don't count. So I guess everything is going according to plan. So this all could just be nothing.
I'm genuinely confused about why the Iranians (apparently) care about the midterms. Didn't we just get through four years of the Democrats letting Israel do whatever it pleased? Congressional dems have already shown that they have no intention of doing anything that might put a stop to the war, and see it as someone they don't like taking a hit to do something they wanted done anyways.
The Russians, in contrast, seem to understand now that the political establishment is pretty thoroughly neoconservative regardless of the sentiments of the American people, which is why they're willing to take cash to do something that helps the political fortunes of an administration that hasn't been very friendly with them.
I do think that either country could achieve a lot by pointing out that Lindsay Graham openly mocked Trump to the press while selling him on this war, presenting him as gullible and dismissing the voices of his supporters. Reminding him that the neoconservatives he's taking hits for despite him might make him less inclined to do as they say.
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I have to ask- how competently do you believe this sentence characterizes the situation?
The Saudi-Huthi conflict was in a pause during the recent year, and was a non-factor for the US-Iran conflict which both Saudis and Huthis largely stayed out of. It re-ignited post-MOU when the Saudis tried to block an Iranian flight from landing in Huthi-conntrolled territory by bombing an airstrip, which was either responded to or provoked to justify a retaliation depending on who you ask. In the last week(s), the Huthis and Saudis have had dueling offensives, with significant increases in missile and airstrikes as the southern front shifts too and fro.
Saudi Arabia and the Huthis have a separate conflict independent not only of the US-Iran war, but predating the Huthi-Iran alliance. Saudi is not 'still' beinng attacked by Iran's Huthi proxy as a continuation of the US-Iran war because Saudi was not attacked by the Huthis during the US-Iran war in the first place. And also calling the Huthi's an iranian proxy is wildly misleading of the dynamic. The American war goals in the US-Iran war are orthagonal to the resumption of the Saudi-Huthi conflict, because the war-ending effort of the MOU had nothing in particular too say about the Saudi-Huthi conflict, unlike other Iranian proxies active at the time, and the Huthi-Saudi conflict predates the US-Iran war by a decade.
I get that Shakes' Trumpian triumphalism can be annoying, but this is the sort of pretty bad reading of regional dynamics that gives him more than a bit of a leg to stand. By trying to conflate a separate (and pre-existing) conflict into a rhetorical cudgel regarding the conflict you want to contest the characterization off, you're just giving Shakes a lot to (correctly) reject, and in the process letting him use (well justified) rebuttals to paint the counter-picture that annoys you.
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Trump has completely given up on “tanker for tanker”
Trump has completely given up on striking anywhere in Iran, for weeks apparently, even as Iran launches volleys of drones and missiles daily
Iran “remains well-stocked with ballistic missiles and some anti-ship weapons, and can quickly add more”, while receiving new armaments from Russia, and we should assume Russia has a desire to embarrass their #1 geopolitical rival who helped get them into the Ukraine kurfuffle
the fire rises upon the namesake of Ahura Mazda: Iran’s strikes are causing more severe damage, and their range of attacks grows larger
Iran has struck a bare minimum of 15 vessels in two weeks, could be much more than that but they stagger the reporting
sailors are being offered 4-6x normal wages for crossing the strait, indicating serious risks to life or limb (why would any sailor care if the vessel were merely struck? That would mean less work and command a lower wage. How much would a third world mariner risk to make 6x wages?)
As of October 4th, known Iranian route crossings rose from 23.2% to 29.9%; no vessels crossed via the Omani Route; the rest were dark transit / unknown. (Why does no one talk about what a big chunk of ships use the Iranian route?)
Vessel crossings in total fell past few days; October 8th was the lowest number of crossings in two months
Kpler’s head of geopolitical risk speculates that the Arabs are paying Iran to get their crude out. They are paying the toll.
Americans left Iraq without disarming the Shia militias, which was part of their original deal with the Iraqi government for their condition of leaving.
Are we winning yet?
I think if we were to see a quick resolution in a way that was favorable we'd probably expect to see oil prices that were low both in the spot market but in the futures market as well. (Or at the very least, a much steeper term structure.) As it stands if I want to get 1000 barrels of crude in December, it'd cost about $90.50/bbl. If I want it in August, it still would cost roughly $81/bbl or so. (Eyeballing the futures for WTI Crude Oil.)
Before the war, we were trading at around $70 or so. The futures that has that price roughly is around sometime in mid-2028. Now these prices move a lot and are subject to drop a lot on some headline but even that effect is becoming muted as Trump decides to declare victory every week or so.
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Yes, we are.
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It's hard to overstate how little this matters for the midterms. Saudi Arabia? The Houthis? To the extent that Americans know about these things at all, they accurately identify them as alien people with strange and violent customs entirely alien to our own experience.
The Iran War? Also a nothingburger. Unless American GI's start getting sent home in bodybags, and they very much aren't, it just doesn't matter. We can keep this up forever and it doesn't even move the needle. Gas isn't expensive, except for diesel, and that is more related to what's happening in Russia. Not that voters even know or care.
And of course an October surprise would be very much good for Trump just as every other attack from Pearl Harbor to 9/11 has been good for the incumbent.
The midterm election will be decided based on vibes and turnout. Mundane things like rules for mail in ballots and early in person voting matter a lot. The Iran War does not. Who is even being swayed? What are you going to do, vote for the party of gender transitions and open borders because of a foreign conflict that has killed, checks notes, 21 service members? There are much bigger issues at stake, and everyone has already made up there mind. Both parties have a hard floor and a hard ceiling and rely mostly on elderly voters and ethnic voting blocs.
The internet is not the real world.
Where I am, gas is about $1 more expensive than before. That adds up to a massive, devastating cost of $50 per month in gas expenses. Whatever will we do???
But in all seriousness it's all about vibes and people don't like to see number go up. The egg shortage is over. But the beef shortage is not. People will forget the one that ended and only remember the current crisis.
In all practicality for people who eat beef often, the beef shortage likely affects cost of living more than fuel prices right now.
Everything you get at the store also uses gasoline for transportation, so higher prices puts a direct inflationary pressure on basically every physical product. These effects will not be seen immediately as prices tend to increase more smoothly, but they will happen overtime just like with the tariffs.
Technically, it most likely uses diesel-fuel, which has gone up even more.
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While it's true that the anti-government forces in Yemen are supported by Iran, that conflict would continue even if Iran magically poofed out of existence.
He considers a lot of things and does fuck all for many of the time. In fact Trump even says he will do something many times and still does fuck all, so saying he'll consider something is truly a nothingburger.
Very low according to polymarket. Maybe escalation of attacks against shipping but not by that much.
Why wouldn't they escalate in all the previous months? It's clear that the retarded tit-for-tat strikes of previous months have been a pain in the ass for both sides, and Iran would rather chill in the current standoff. While there's a chance Trump will escalate in the coming months, there's also a massive chance that Trump will pussy out like he's done countless times before, and Iran seems to like those odds.
The Houthis have repeatedly showed willingness to make peace with the United States. It's true that their recent attacks are not in the US's best interests, but they're clearly targeted at KSA and while the Houthis have the capacity to disrupt far more than they have done so far, they have chosen not to use that capability.
On the other hand Iran got a peace deal with quite favorable concessions from the USA but decided they still want to blow stuff up.
That’s a good point on Iran thinking he might just do another TACO. But if they think he may attack after the midterms, then their best strategy imo is to kick it off early and embarrass Trump and ensure a historic defeat. Making attacking them a political suicide is in their best interest. But maybe their intelligence thinks they have done enough. Interesting on the Polymarket odds. That makes me lower my estimate. I hadn’t seen those.
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If the war was being won, or even if Trump perceived the war was being won, then wouldn't he be making more extravagant demands too? At the start he was Truthing that only someone he chose or favoured could be president of Iran or else they'd keep up the assassination campaign (this was back in the regime change phase of the war, quite early on).
He's not doing that right now.
Instead of bullying Europe into releasing more diesel from their reserves or granting sanctions relief to Russia, he'd be trying to threaten or harass Iran more to capitalize on the victory. He'd be demanding money or oil from them under threat from bombing (since they don't have any air defences or ability to strike back, right?)
Trump is hardly likely to develop a magnanimous streak before a beaten opponent he routinely rails against and hates.
Surely if the US was winning or had won the war, they'd be moving back in and rebuilding the 5th fleet headquarters in Bahrain, sitting ships right in the straits to show control and allow the 200+ ships waiting around there to navigate freely. There wouldn't be any tankers being attacked, apparently 16 were in the last 2 weeks:
https://x.com/NoamRaydan/status/2109043440633946336
I don’t actually think the war was over. I was linking to a comment that had said it was 100% over.
I know, I agree with you. In retrospect I should've made that more clear.
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