Peter Smith

The Great Gamble: Inside Trump’s High-Risk Approach to Complex Systems that Fuels His Personal Empire The war is escalating. Not in one place, but everywhere at once. Iran is striking Kurdish dissident camps inside Iraqi Kurdistan, and Iranian Kurds are fighting the IRGC in Mahabad, Sardasht and Piranshahr. In Baghdad, the government has been quietly purging officials with dual loyalties, a soft coup dressed up as an anti-corruption drive. In the Red Sea, the Houthis have declared a naval blockade against Saudi Arabia, threatening a corridor that carries around seven percent of the world’s oil. Meanwhile the core Israeli conflicts sit in stasis, not because they are resolved, but because Israel is exhausted and America has burned through its stock of stand-off precision munitions and air defence interceptors. Washington is left running a low-intensity aerial campaign while it resupplies Tel Aviv and hopes the rest holds. This is not chaos. It is a pattern, and there is a name for it: e...