Iran Folded. Moscow and Beijing Did Nothing
Iran has agreed to a deal that reopens the Strait of Hormuz, lifts the U.S. naval blockade, releases roughly $25 billion in frozen Iranian assets, and waives oil sanctions — in exchange for freezing uranium enrichment, diluting its highly-enriched stockpile, and a written pledge to never build a nuclear weapon. Signing is set for this week.
None of this should surprise you if you’ve watched this channel. Months ago I laid out the oil doctrine: there is a way to break a regime without invading it — you use the one thing keeping it solvent, its oil. Iran’s crude had essentially one buyer left, so squeezing the Strait of Hormuz didn’t strangle the West; it strangled Iran’s only customer. Iran thought of Hormuz as its trap for the world; it was turned into a weapon against the regime — they blockaded it, then the U.S. blockaded their blockade, and made the buyer feel the pain. It cost us at the pump. It cost Tehran the survival of its system.
On the surface Iran looks like it won. Then you read what it gave up: enrichment frozen, its highly-enriched uranium to be diluted, a written pledge never to build a weapon. Iran got a little of its money back, but it can no longer blackmail the world. And the same serious people who swore Trump walked into Beijing weak — and who promised another Iraq in Venezuela, then Iran, then Cuba — were wrong every time. None of those three regimes has the backing of Moscow or Beijing anymore. Nobody is there to save them, so they deal with Trump instead. Run the leverage math instead of the talking point: the rest of the world just watched America strategically outflank Russia and China.
Eric Garland brings 30 years of strategic intelligence practice. He is an intelligence analyst personally sanctioned by the Russian Federation in May 2022 for his work on Russian intelligence operations, and the author of the 2016 “Game Theory” thread, named by The New York Times as one of the 25 most important tweets in history.
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SOURCES
PBS NewsHour / ABC News — U.S.–Iran deal; Hormuz reopened, naval blockade to end, Jun 14 2026
Times of Israel — Deal terms ($25B assets, oil-sanction waiver, enrichment freeze, HEU dilution), Jun 14 2026
Axios — Draft memorandum: enrichment suspension and stockpile removal, May–Jun 2026
Game Theory Today — “Starve the Treasury or Starve the Grid” (the oil doctrine), 2026
U.S. Treasury / OFAC — Foxtrot network & Rawa Majid designation (Iran’s rent-a-hit), Mar 2025
