The Receipt

The Wall Street Journal reported this morning that the President is prepared to end the Iran war without a nuclear deal — any nuclear deal — if Tehran will reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

Read that with the original sales pitch in mind. The war started February 28 over Iran's nuclear program. Five months and forty billion dollars later, the offer is: forget the nuclear program, just move the boats.

Here's the part nobody puts in the story. We can't find the nuclear program anymore. Not because we destroyed it. Because we blew up the ability to look.

Let me be straight about the trend, because it cuts against the easy version of this story. Prices peaked in spring and are coming down. June's consumer price index actually went negative — down 0.4%, the biggest one-month drop since April 2020, with gasoline falling 9.7% in that month alone.

Nobody can honestly tell you prices are spiking today. They aren't.

What they can tell you is that the money is gone and it isn't coming back. There is no refund on a summer of four-dollar gas. And gasoline is still 26.7% higher than it was a year ago.

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Bernard Yaros, lead U.S. economist at Oxford Economics, put it plainly: "From an inflationary perspective, I'm very concerned about the recent rise in diesel prices as it pertains to the cost of food or grocery store prices."

He said diesel touches every layer of food production in this country. A loaded semi now costs more than $1,280 to fill. Somebody pays that. It isn't the truck.

And there's a bill that hasn't arrived yet. About a third of globally traded fertilizer moves through Hormuz, and about a third of American fertilizer is imported. An American Farm Bureau survey in April found 70% of farmers couldn't afford all the fertilizer they needed, and half of corn growers said they'd under-apply.

Projected corn acreage fell to 95.3 million from 98.8 million. That doesn't show up at the register this year. It shows up next year, in a number nobody will connect to a war.

This is the part that should end the argument.

The International Atomic Energy Agency stopped verification activities in Iran on February 28 — the day the war started. Inspectors have been denied access to twenty declared sites.

In its own reporting, the Agency says it cannot provide any information on the current size, composition, or whereabouts of Iran's stockpile of enriched uranium. The last verified count was 440.9 kilograms enriched to 60%. That is not a power-plant number, and no inspector has laid eyes on it since February.

So follow it down. We went to war over a nuclear program. The war ended the inspections. Ending the inspections means we no longer know where the material is. And the reported new position is to end the war without a nuclear deal, on the theory that the stockpile is no longer a significant issue.

We can't find it. That is what "no longer a significant issue" turns out to mean.

And before anyone tells you this was the plan all along: Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard testified on March 18 that Iran was not rebuilding its enrichment program before the war, and declined to say it posed an imminent threat. Three weeks in. This administration's own intelligence chief.

Neither this year's budget nor next year's includes a dollar of the war. The Pentagon warned it would run short of operating funds by this summer.

That reserve exists for an emergency. We spent a third of it holding down the price of a war we started. If a real emergency arrives this winter, that's the barrel that won't be there.

Axios counted twelve times by the end of March that Trump signaled the war was ending. Another tally puts it at thirty.

March 11: "We've won." March 15: "We've essentially defeated Iran." April 17: "It's over, it's a great victory." June 17: an actual signed memorandum with President Pezeshkian. July 8: the ceasefire declared over. July 11: 140 targets struck.

So when a report lands on a Sunday saying it might end tomorrow, know what you're reading. You're reading the thirty-first one.

Chevron CEO Mike Wirth, asked on the earnings call whether high prices were destroying demand: "Demand destruction is not obvious to me at any significant scale." On petrochemical margins, he said they'd been "buoyant, to say the least." On what's ahead: "This is the largest and highest-quality opportunity set that we've had in years."

Lockheed CEO Jim Taiclet: "The government is giving us a lot more flexibility than they traditionally would have done… so that we can be faster."

You're paying for the flexibility twice. Once at the pump, once in the munitions line.

Michael Gray is 76, semi-retired, in Westport, Massachusetts. His fill-up went from $44 to $60. Asked whether he could still drive to a museum: "I really can't do it, because it would cost me a tank of gas."

Tashiani Brito is 43, a preschool teacher in Chelsea raising a child on her own: "I feel like I'm working just to come and buy food."

Neither of them was consulted about the Strait of Hormuz. Both of them are paying for it.

Thirteen Americans dead. Forty billion dollars. A third of the emergency oil reserve, gone. Five hundred forty-five dollars out of the average household. A shipping lane still closed on day 161. And 440 kilograms of enriched uranium no inspector has seen since February.

The offer is to call it finished if Iran moves some boats.

That isn't a peace deal. It's a receipt for a war nobody won, handed to people who were never asked whether they wanted one, by a man who has announced the ending about thirty times and hasn't gotten to one yet.

If this is the kind of accounting you want in your inbox, forward it to one person who's been told the pump price is just the weather.

They keep announcing the ending. You keep getting the bill.

— Michael