Sparks: US oil prices flip-flop ahead of Trump's deadline to bomb Iranian power plants

The threat of absolute power corrupts markets long before the first bomb falls, a lesson Carthage learned and every subsequent empire has forgotten at its own peril.

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting, not to announce a timetable for your own strategic paralysis.

Fluctuating prices reveal a national credit strained by the whims of a single man, a structural weakness no republic can long afford.

Observing the slight, daily variations in price reveals not a rational market but a nervous system flinching in anticipation of a shock it cannot yet calculate.

Nothing so concentrates a speculator's mind on the moral dimensions of foreign policy as the chance to turn a quick profit on the announcement of its failure.

A deadline for violence is the confession of a mind that has run out of every other idea.

We secretly delight in the spectacle of our own impending ruin, betting on it even as we publicly decry its architect.

In matters of grave importance, the fluctuation of price, not the constancy of principle, reveals the true national character.

This mechanism of threat and market response operates not on logic but on the crude arithmetic of fear, a most unimaginative and predictable sequence.

A proposition that begins with an ultimatum and concludes with violence is not statecraft but a failure of geometry.

From this vantage, one observes the peculiar local custom of pricing catastrophe in advance, as if it were a commodity like any other.

Hateful things: a market that treats the promise of distant suffering as a thing to be traded.

One must draw the isothermal lines connecting the rhetoric of power, the anxiety of the market, and the impending ecological shock to the river systems.

Declaring a deadline for violence is the political equivalent of educating women for weakness - it creates the very instability it claims to prevent.

Setting a date for the abandonment of reason and the embrace of force mocks the very principles of justice and deliberation that power claims to uphold.