With oil markets nearing the danger zone, a US-Iran deal can’t come soon enough | Heather Stewart

The sea, again. The great powers turn their eyes to the Persian Gulf, believing they can plow it into a stable field of commerce and quiet politics. They speak of deals, of tipping points, of the rational management of chaos. I see only the coalition that will dissolve at the moment of victory.

A US-Iran agreement? What is its shared project? To lower the price of oil, to calm the markets. It is a project of convenience, a temporary alignment against the specter of inflation and recession. And when the price falls, when the immediate danger recedes, what then? The coalition will discover it was never a coalition. Iran’s interests and America’s interests are not the same; they are merely, for a season, not violently opposed. The document they will sign will be a constitution for a peace that the ground cannot sustain. It will be written in a language of diplomacy that neither society truly speaks.

They believe they are building an institution - a framework, a détente. But it is an institution designed to prevent a catastrophe that each side defines differently. For one, it is economic turmoil; for the other, it is existential encirclement. The justification for the pact will be invisible to the people who must live under its terms. And so it will fail. Not because of betrayal, but because the soil was never ready for this seed.

I see the caudillo inevitability in this, too. When the pact strains, each side will retreat to its strongman, to the familiar posture of threat and defiance. The liberator - in this case, the diplomat - will become the only point of contact, the only institution with enough legitimacy to hold the line. And that line will become a wall. They will win the agreement. It will not be enough. The enemy had been the high price of oil. Without it, there will be nothing but the vast, ungovernable distance between their worlds. They are writing a constitution for a nation that does not, and cannot, exist.

The scribes of the market, they wail of “danger zones” and “tipping points” for oil, as if the very heavens would fall should the price of black gold fluctuate. They cry for a “deal” between the Americans and the Persians, a single, sanctioned agreement to bring order to their precious ledgers.

But I see not one market, but a thousand, each with its own currents and eddies, its own demands and supplies. The insistence that a singular “deal” is the only path to stability is the same old song sung by the Inquisitors of the Exchequer. They declare one truth, one path, one price, and brand all deviations as heresy against their economic dogma.

They speak of inflation and recession as if these are acts of God, rather than the predictable tremors of a system built on singular, fragile assumptions. The true danger is not the price of oil, but the minds that insist there is only one way for the world to turn, one axis upon which all prosperity must spin. There are other sources, other energies, other ways of commerce. The refusal to acknowledge these pluralities, to crush them under the weight of a single, approved “deal,” that is the true path to ruin. They will burn the world to keep their single candle lit.

12th February 1871

The news of these oil markets and the prospect of a US-Iran agreement stirs in me a familiar unease - not for the political machinations, which I confess I scarcely comprehend, but for the deeper pattern it reveals. Here again we see the delicate interdependence of nations, much like the tangled bank of species I have so long observed.

The instability of prices, the threat of inflation, the specter of recession - these are but symptoms of a system under strain. One cannot help but note the parallel to natural systems: when resources grow scarce, competition intensifies, and the equilibrium shifts. The proposed agreement appears as an attempt at artificial regulation, much like the selective pressures we impose in breeding. Yet I wonder - will it hold, or will the underlying forces reassert themselves, as surely as wild varieties revert when cultivation ceases?

The most curious datum is the timing - three months since some event (the summary is frustratingly truncated) has passed, and now the market nears a “tipping point.” How like the slow accumulation of geological pressures before an earthquake! The political response, then, is akin to the desperate shoring up of a levee against an inevitable flood.

I confess I am reluctant to draw conclusions without fuller evidence. But the pattern is unmistakable: whether in nature or in commerce, systems strained beyond their capacity must adapt - or collapse. The question is not whether change will come, but what form it will take. And that, I fear, depends on forces far beyond the contrivances of diplomacy.