Iran, Oil and the Next Financial Crisis | Luke Gromen

In a single day, oil went from $119 to $84, the US evacuated its embassy in Saudi Arabia, and a CBS report citing Trump declared the war over—minutes before Iran resumed hitting Israel. This was not a clean victory. It was, in the estimation of macro analyst Luke Gromen, a strategic draw at best, and one that exposed a deeper structural shift in global power. The episode is a dense, real-time analysis of what that shift means for markets, the dollar, and the next financial crisis.

The Strait of Hormuz and the End of Naval Dominance

The central argument of the conversation is that the Iran-Israel conflict revealed a revolution in military affairs that has upended four centuries of geopolitical order. Gromen points to a single, damning fact: the United States Navy, the most powerful in history, would not enter the Strait of Hormuz during the conflict. "The United States Navy could not open the Strait of Hormuz," he repeats, calling it the "inconvenient truth" that everyone is avoiding. The reason, he argues, is that cheap missiles and drones have made naval checkpoints into kill zones, rendering trillions of dollars of traditional naval equipment obsolete. He cites Eric Prince, former head of Blackwater, who called this the biggest change in military strategy "since stirrups were put on horses 800 years ago." The implication is stark: the Mahan doctrine—the idea that contro