When the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt stepped up to the podium yesterday to announce “President Trump thinks there’s a substantial chance of negotiations that may or may not take place with Iran in the near future”, going on to say that any decision on whether the US will carry out a military strike on Iran will be considered over the next two weeks, the derision and cries of TACO (Trump always chickens out) are heard from Washington to a disappointed Tel Aviv. The statement was immediately challenged with an observation by a member of the press gaggle comparing how Trump had often given such two-week deadline to Russia on Ukraine negotiations and yet the world is still waiting. The President deserves little sympathy, his braggadocio and volte face style of impunity calls for none, but the US is being dragged into a multi-millennia-aged vortex, and he needs to weigh his instinct of avoiding war with the internationally shared opinion that Iran should never have a nuclear weapon.

Perhaps, and in the end, a bunker busting attack on the Iranian nuclear facility at Fordow will be the least of all evils. Our stance, much as all the sane folk of the world remains anti-war and pro-trade, with the former maxim being sorely tested by such an opening statement in this argument. But the stream of consciousness whereafter the B2s, having released their payloads and at the same time of clearing Iranian airspace are accompanied by a full diplomatic thrust from the US cancelling all Iran trade sanctions while insisting Israel puts all its military toys back in the box, starts to offer some sort of warped logic. President Trump and the United States have no truck with Iran other than it having a nuclear weapon, it certainly does not seek regime change, no matter how an influential and brooding Benjamin Netanyahu commands the stage of calling for one.

Within the MAGA movement, the proponent of US isolationism, Steve Bannon, as reported on Reuters, is vehemently opposed to US involvement saying, "the Israelis need to finish what they started" backing up an opinion from Georgia Republican, Marjorie Tayor Greene, "anyone slobbering for the U.S. to become fully involved in the Israel/Iran war is not America First/MAGA.” Knowing where he is and how easy he might be to target is different to selling an assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to an electoral base who were promised no more foreign wars as being in America’s interest is a sale too far, even for the master of ‘The Art of the Deal’. Therefore, a surgical or precision strikes on Iran’s geologically protected atomic assets serves three purposes. It rids the notion of Iran being a clear and present danger to the US without a protracted military campaign, it can be sold as defensive to President Trump’s base and lastly appeases the rightful paranoia the state of Isreal is under. It could also be argued that any backlash from Iran might just be less emotional and be internationally detained if nuclear aspirations are made dead rather than a spiritual leader.

‘Just remember that it took the US four presidents, trillions of dollars, thousands of lives, and twenty years to replace the Taliban with...the Taliban’, so the popular satirical joke goes after the calamitous US withdrawal from Afghanistan under the tenure of Joe Biden. Yet there is historical reality and truth to the humour. The eventual overthrow of Saddam Hussain in Iraq has had disastrous consequence even up until current times. It inspired civil war and the eventual rise of the horrific ISIS movement and to this day the fallout is seen in everyday life. Iraq’s recent history could well be repeated in a vacuum that would arrive if full regime change occurred in Tehran. Fractious warlords with who-knows-what alliances, with who-knows-what countries will emerge and the symmetry is made even more pronounced with a large Kurdish population. Imagine then a joining of Iranian Kurds with their autonomous brethren in Iraq and its destabilising effect felt by Turkey. For oil purposes it offers a future of many parties not only applying influence in Iran’s crude production, but a hydra’s head of threat to the seaways of sensitive lanes such as Hormuz, our current inspiration for $77/barrel Brent. Need more convincing? Cut and paste the same argument into Libya and the answer is still a destabilised, fragmented mess.

President Trump in many media outlets is reported to have approved a plan to attack Iran. He just is not ready to give the go ahead. Yesterday, we opined on how conflict in oil sensitive areas rarely sees protracted bullish effects on prices. Oil derivatives act in time honoured tradition always falling into the ‘buy the rumour, sell the fact’ practice. This will be the case in a US strike on Fordow and others of its Iranian atomic ilk and will not have the protraction of enforced regime change, that needs to come from within, and although destabilising itself will not involve a rebellion that shoots at Western occupiers as a point of unity. Barring a full-blown diplomatic climbdown from Iran, the logical time for US action is at a weekend when markets are closed with nowhere to express investor/trade hyper-emotion. Predicting it to be this weekend is black/red roulette stuff. However, arguing that taking a military scalpel to Iran rather than a sledgehammer is a reasonable muse and might just be one in which the US President finds accord, even after two weeks.

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