After the Donald’s Demolition Derby in the Persian Gulf – A Last Ride on Marine One Won’t Be Far Behind

Well, here’s another flashing red warning light. The price of #2 diesel oil – the fuel that enables America’s giant trucking, rail and farm tractor fleets to generate and haul nearly $100 billion of GDP each and every day – including Sundays, holidays and snow days – is now up a staggering +44%from its January 2026 level. At $5.07 per gallon at the end of last week, in fact, it is knocking on the door of the $5.75 per gallon peak it reached during the June 2022 inflation blow-off top.

As the workhorse hydrocarbon of the American economy, #2 diesel oil is always a leading vector of stagflation: It gets embedded over and over again in supply chain costs as goods move through farm, factory, warehouse and distribution commerce, and also burdens output expansion when it begins to spurt higher like at present.

National Average Price Of Diesel Oil, 2022 to 2026

Needless to say, America’s manufacturing economy doesn’t need any new cost shock barriers. Output growth was already sputtering before the Donald had his chain pulled by Bibi Netanyahu. In fact, the index of manufacturing output for February 2026 was at the very same level it stood at in February 2012.

That’s right. We have had one quarter century of absolute stagnation in the level of physical goods output in the US economy. And now the hammer is about to come down hard on both the energy and food supply chains which fuel the aggregate economy.

Index of Manufacturing Output, 2012 to 2026

Of course, the sheer stagnation of the manufacturing economy despite the Donald’s whirligig of tariffing and attacks on alleged malefactors of trade the world over hasn’t diminished his Greatest Economy Ever boasting by one bit. So again, we must point out that the Donald has presided over the “worst growth ever” during his two turns at bat to date, not the best.

Thus, during his first term the real economic growth rate as measured by real final sales of domestic production weighed in at just 43% of the 1947 to 2000 average under 10 different presidents. Likewise, for all his attacking of Sleepy Joe’s alleged economic disaster the growth rate in 2025 was actually down by 36% from the 4-year average under Biden.

Real Economic Growth Per Annum:

• 1947-2000: 3.54%.
• 2016-2020: 1.53%.
• 2020-2024: 3.48%.
• 2024-2025: 2.23%.

Yes, the Donald never lets facts or realities get in the way of his braggadocio. Still, now that he has launched a double-barreled attack on the world via utterly misbegotten notions about both economics and national security we perforce wonder how in the world he thinks this utterly reckless escapade is not going to come crashing down on his own political head?

Real Final Sales Of Domestic Product, 2016 to 2025

That is to say, in the vernacular of the moment: There was no “imminent threat” to domestic prosperity owing to the trade policies of foreign countries, nor was there an imminent national security threat from the Iranian regime in Tehran. Putting the US economy in harms’ way owing to a globe-shaking economic cataclysm originating in the Donald’s Persian Gulf Demolition Derby is just plain insensible.

After all, we have debunked elsewhere the Bibi Netanyahu Lie about an Iranian nuke lurking around the the corner and have also shown that its military could not have gotten a plane, missile or ship even past the Strait of Gibraltar. Yet when it comes to the sheer idiocy of the scary stories about Big Bad Iran that led to the current insanity in the Persian Gulf, just consider the present topic of GDP.

We are talking about the sheer economic heft it would take any nation to mount a meaningful attack on the American as amplified below, but here’s the spoiler alert. The US economy even as impaired with inflation, debt and speculation as it is generates nearly $90 billion of GDP per day at its current run rate.

In turn, that means every four days the US economy generates more output than does the Iranian economy in an entire year!

And that’s not all. Iran’s entire defense budget of $23 billion in 2025 was equivalent to just eight days of Pentagon spending.

So holy moly. How does a pipsqueak economy and midget military constitute a threat so severe that it became necessary to ignite a Demolition Derby in the Persian Gulf?

The truth is, it’s just plain barking insanity to claim that the Iranians are so evil and irrational that even if they scrapped together enough highly enriched uranium for a few nukes that they would launch them against the territory of the United States.

Of course, they have no long-range bombers or missiles that could deliver fully weaponized nukes even if they had them, but they also don’t have another even more crucial ingredient. To wit, a raging national suicide impulse that would a prerequisite for dropping a bomb on Washington if Iran had the delivery capacity because it would mean the immediate and total incineration of their entire country – virtually every man, woman and child in every one of their major cities.

Stated more clinically, the entire case for uncorking any and all means including a devastating war in the Persian Gulf to prevent Iran from getting a nuke – which its supreme leader had a long-standing fatwa (religious command) against until Bibi Netanyahu murdered him – is that Iran purportedly presents the one case on the planet where MAD (mutual assured destruction) would fail.

That is to say, after the US incinerated upwards of 200,000 innocent civilians at Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945 the nuclear bomb genie has been kept in the bottle. MAD has worked, will work and there has never been any plausible case made that Iran’s theocratic regime is any exception.

So what we are dealing with amounts to a war with 21st century technology of destruction based on religious fanaticism. And we do not mean that of the Shiite clerics who misrule the Iranian people.

The real fanatics are Bibi Netanyahu and the neocon warmongers domiciled in the banks of the Potomac. They have created a “47-Year War on America” narrative which is an utter, complete and unmitigated Big Lie, as we have documented in recent posts.

But now this horrific Big Lie has become embodied in the most senseless war by far that the American Warfare State has yet launched. And its not only jeopardizing upwards of one-fourth of of globally consumed petroleum and LNG-based hydrocarbons, but the global food supply, too.

That’s because at the end of the day world agriculture production is now an embodiment of nitrogen fertilizer, which in turn is extracted from natural gas. And anyone in possession of the facts, a brain to think with and the discipline to weigh the balances inherent in attacking Iran would have known that the Persian Gulf countries sit atop the world’s cheapest and most abundant natural gas.

Qatar, Iran, and Saudi Arabia possess enormous reserves. Gas feedstock accounts for 70–90% of the cost of producing ammonia and urea. Gulf producers therefore enjoy a structural cost advantage that no one else can match. Accordingly, they have built world-scale plants right next to the gas fields and right next to the sea.The numbers are staggering:

• Global ammonia production reached approximately 189.8 million metric tons in 2024 (IFA), with seaborne trade around 18–20 million tons annually.
• The Middle East/Persian Gulf region accounted for 23% of global ammonia trade in 2025. Countries exposed to the region represent roughly 30% of all globally traded ammonia.
• Urea is even more concentrated. Global urea production hit a record 200 million metric tons in 2024. Seaborne trade volumes run 55–60 million tons per year. The Persian Gulf supplies 46–50% of globally traded urea and nearly half of all urea exports worldwide.
  • The five key Gulf exporters (Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain) supplied 34% of global urea trade in 2024.
  • Qatar alone accounted for 10–11% of world urea exports.
  • Saudi Arabia also supplied 8–10% of the world total.
  • Iran supplied 5–12% and was the second or third-largest supplier in many recent years.
  • Monthly exports from the Arab Gulf routinely exceed 1.5 million tons of urea, with Iran adding another 350,000–400,000 tons per month in normal times.

In 2024, 18.5 million tons of urea — more than one-third of all globally traded urea — passed through the Strait of Hormuz. Then when you add in sulfur (the Gulf supplies about 44–50% of global exports) and phosphates, it turns out that the Strait handles roughly one-third of all global fertilizer trade.

Signal Ocean data for 2025 showed that 20% of all fertilizer flows originated from the Arabian Gulf — rising to 46% when limited to urea alone.

Needless to say, these cargoes don’t stay in the Gulf, but rather they feed the world:

• India imports more than 40% of its urea from the Persian Gulf region.
• Brazil, the United States, Europe, Southeast Asia, and Africa all rely heavily on Gulf urea and ammonia.
• One analysis showed that Qatar’s nitrogen fertilizer exports alone kept 43 million people fed in the U.S., Brazil, and India combined (2022 baseline, still relevant).

Farmers in Iowa, Punjab, and the Brazilian Cerrado plant corn, wheat, and soybeans that literally grow on Gulf natural gas transformed into fertilizer. When Gulf supply is disrupted, prices spike globally — as we have seen dramatically already.

Yet we are just getting started on the food front. When war between Russia and Ukraine broke-out in February 2022, the world food index soared by 63% in a matter of months. And that was owing to both countries’ significant role as suppliers of wheat and other food and feed grains, which commodity price effects than worked their way through food supply chains for the next two years.

This time, however, we are talking about the entire food crop production system in the entire world. Prices of ammonia and urea are already up by 30-50%, and this is coming just on the eve of the planting season across the entire northern hemisphere.

It is virtually certain, therefore, that planted acreage will be reduced and yields on what is planted will fall materially because application rates will be reduced owing to soaring prices.

Global Food Price Index, 2018 to 2026

In short, roughly one-third of global fertilizer trade, 20% of oil, and 20% of LNG transit the narrow passage of the Strait of Hormuz. In normal times, 18–20 million tons of urea and millions of tons of ammonia move through it annually. When conflict closes or threatens the Strait — as has now occurred — production halts at giant plants natural gas processing and fertilizer plants in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. Ships sit idle. Insurance costs skyrocket. And the world discovers just how dependent modern agriculture has become on one fragile maritime corridor.

In short, by November 2026 the price of food and energy will be soaring, Washington will be in paralysis owing to an inability to finance the $200 billion tab for the Bibi/Donald War announced today, and the fact the public debt would then be in excess of $40 trillion if the Donald could muster enough votes to raise the public debt ceiling to that level.

He won’t remotely have the votes because his vicious school-boy attacks have alienated most of whatever sensible heads remain in the banks of the Potomac. Even the MAGA faithful by then will be lined up in a circular firing squad long before the election.

At that point, the Donald will be confronted with “doing it the easy way or the hard way”,

He’d be well advised to read Tricky Dick Nixon’s memoirs on how best to handle the choice between resignation and a FINAL RIDE ON MARINE ONE or impeachment – a wholly deserved choice which is surely coming his way long before next year’s spring solstice.