Nobody Wants To Talk About The War

That’s Exactly Why We Should.

Somewhere right now, a trader in London is watching a Truth Social notification and deciding whether to buy or sell oil. A head of state is waiting by the phone to find out if a war is back on. And the rest of us are… debating something on the internet that absolutely does not matter.

This is the world we’re living in. And the Iran war is the story most people are doing their level best to ignore.

And I get it. I do. We’ve had a few years of relentless, grinding news cycles. People are tired. The apocalypse has been scheduled and cancelled so many times that we’ve collectively started treating it like a dentist appointment we keep rescheduling. Easier not to think about it.

But here’s the thing about this one. This isn’t background noise. This is genuinely, historically significant. And the fact that it feels overwhelming is precisely the reason to pay attention, not retreat.

Here’s What Actually Happened

On the 28th of February 2026, the United States and Israel launched a joint military campaign against Iran. They assassinated Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in the opening salvo. Iran responded by closing the Strait of Hormuz and firing missiles across the region. Lebanon got dragged back in. The Gulf states started taking drone strikes. Dubai International Airport, one of the busiest airports on the planet, was damaged and effectively shut down for a stretch.

A ceasefire was brokered by Pakistan in early April. It collapsed. The US then imposed a full naval blockade on Iran. Tens of thousands of people are dead. Millions have been displaced.

And on Monday the 18th of May, we found out that Donald Trump had quietly planned a “very major attack” on Iran for Tuesday… and called it off the day before. Not because the situation was resolved. Because the leaders of Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE rang him up and said: give us two or three days, we think we’re close to a deal.

He said yes. The oil price dropped two dollars in minutes. Then crept back up.

That’s where we are.

The Part Nobody Seems To Want To Say Out Loud

The global economy is now effectively being day-traded against a man’s Truth Social posts.

I don’t say that to be glib. I say it because it’s literally true, and because the implications of that are worth sitting with for a moment. The price of oil… which affects the cost of food, transport, heating, manufacturing, and roughly everything else… moved in real time based on a social media announcement from a president who had not previously disclosed that a major military strike was even planned.

We have normalised an extraordinary level of chaos. And the normalisation of it is arguably more dangerous than the chaos itself, because it stops us asking the obvious questions.

Questions like: who decided this war was a good idea? Who signed off on assassinating a head of state and triggering a regional conflict that has displaced millions of people? Who is being held accountable for any of it? And why are we all just… scrolling past?

The Uncomfortable Reality About “Complicated”

There’s a lazy habit, and I’ve been guilty of it myself, of labelling something “complicated” as a way of opting out of engaging with it. The Middle East is complicated. Geopolitics is complicated. It’s all very complicated.

But complicated doesn’t mean unknowable. It doesn’t mean ordinary people have no business forming opinions. And it certainly doesn’t mean we should leave it entirely to the people who got us here in the first place.

The Strait of Hormuz carries roughly a fifth of the world’s oil supply through a stretch of water just 33 kilometres wide at its narrowest point. Iran has now suggested it might also target the subsea internet cables running through its waters, which connect much of the Middle East, Asia, and Africa to the global internet. These are not abstract geopolitical chess moves. These are things that affect billions of people’s daily lives.

The people making these decisions are not more intelligent than you. They’re not more moral. They’re often not even particularly well-informed. They’re just further up the chain of a system that rewards confidence over wisdom, and speed over reflection.

What I Actually Think

I think this war was started with staggering arrogance and insufficient imagination about what comes after. I think the ceasefire that followed was always fragile because neither side actually wanted the same thing from it. I think the blockade is a slow-burn catastrophe that will hurt ordinary Iranian people far more than the regime it’s targeting. And I think the fact that Gulf states are now the ones pumping the brakes on US military action tells you something important about how the regional power dynamics have shifted.

I also think there’s a very real chance that something genuinely terrible happens in the next few weeks. Not because I’m a pessimist… but because the architecture for it is all in place. The weapons are there. The grievances are there. The miscommunication is there. And the adults in the room keep getting replaced by people who’ve never met a deadline they couldn’t blow past.

So What Do You Do With All This?

You don’t have to become a foreign policy analyst. You don’t have to post about it every day. But I’d gently push back on the idea that tuning out entirely is a neutral act. It isn’t. Collective disengagement is its own kind of permission.

Read a bit. Ask questions. Be willing to say “I don’t fully understand this, but it matters.” Be suspicious of anyone who tells you it’s too complicated for you to have a view. Be even more suspicious of the tidy narratives that make it sound simple.

And maybe… just maybe… hold the people making these decisions to the same standard you’d hold anyone else who set the world on fire and then asked for a few more days to sort it out.

Because that’s essentially what’s happening. And it deserves more than silence.

Until Next Time