Decks and Deals Weekly #38
The week of March 29 to April 4, 2026 brought a missile into Qatari sovereign waters, the first Western vessel through the Strait of Hormuz, and bunker prices that rewrote their record book
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GeoTrends Team
The EU Ports Strategy that targets China without naming it
Brussels adopted its EU Ports Strategy on 4 March 2026. A leaked draft, obtained weeks earlier, tells a more candid story — one in which COSCO and Piraeus feature prominently, if never by name
The Gulf states were never built to last
On 28 February 2026, Iranian missiles struck Dubai, Doha, and Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province. The world called it a shock. It was, in fact, a long-overdue reckoning with four decades of structural denial
Iran’s Mosaic Defence: why the U.S.-Israeli air campaign is hitting smoke
Over a month into a campaign built on certainties, Washington and Tel Aviv have discovered that Iran’s Mosaic Defence does not simply survive decapitation strikes; it accelerates in their aftermath
What have the Americans ever done for us?
From Hiroshima to Guantánamo, from Guatemala to Iraq: as American hegemony fractures loudly and in real time, history demands we finally ask what the world’s last empire is now leaving behind — and for whom
Decks and Deals Weekly #37
The week of March 22–28, 2026 reshaped global shipping as Hormuz turned into a toll-controlled chokepoint, tanker markets split sharply, and geopolitical shocks from Ukraine to Yemen redrew the map of risk
IMEC and the war no one designed to last this long
Patrick Wood argues Trump’s war on Iran is about the IMEC corridor. The commercial logic holds. The idea that anyone is actually in control does not
Decks and Deals Weekly #36
Between 15 and 21 March 2026, global shipping faced its most compressed week of crisis and calculation — war insurance at 5%, a collapsed record fixture, a proxy fight, and Trump walking away from Hormuz
The system that was supposed to prevent the bomb
A war designed to prevent a nuclear Middle East may instead have made one inevitable. The doctrine of nuclear ambiguity is now geopolitics’ most lethal euphemism
Debt, not war: the logic of hegemonic transition
In 1956, a phone call ended an empire. Not with bombs, but with bonds. Today’s hegemonic transition follows the same logic: power shifts not on battlefields, but through debt, currency and control of financial infrastructure