Doug Casey on Trump’s Peace Deal: “It’s Going to Blow Up”
Trump spent his birthday weekend about the way you’d expect: cage fights, surrounded by people who love him, and a ceasefire between Israel and Iran to cap it off. Everything a man could want.
On this today’s episode I asked Doug what he made of the deal. His answer was three words. “It’s gonna blow up.”
The deal was the party favor
Watch the timing. The whole thing came together so the announcement could land on the birthday — same energy as the cage matches and the gold. A show. And like the birthday, it was over about as fast as it started. Heavy strikes hit Lebanon within a days of everyone shaking hands.
A real peace settles something. This one didn’t. You can’t go back to how things were before, and the new arrangement is worse than the old one: Iran came out of this stronger, not weaker. You bomb a country in a surprise attack, you don’t get to call it even afterward.
The $300 billion question
Part of the deal, as we understand it, hands Iran something like $300 billion. Doug’s first question was the right one — where does that money come from, who puts it up, and in what form? Nobody has answered that.
He thinks Iran goes further. Down the line they insist on a toll on everything moving through the Strait of Hormuz: a dollar a barrel, call it what you like. Plenty of people won’t want to pay it. That isn’t a settled peace.
“Calmed down” is not the same as open
Trump says Hormuz is open and flowing. The numbers say otherwise. Roughly 25 ships transited yesterday in both directions — about 75% below where traffic ran before the shooting started. Somewhere between 1,500 and 1,700 ships are still trapped in the Gulf.
And the market keeps forgetting one thing: even if every one of those ships sailed today, it’s about a month before that oil hits a refinery and becomes something anyone can use. For prices to fall, things have to calm down first — and they haven’t. The enthusiasm about cheap oil coming back looks badly overdone.
Who’s the dog and who’s the master
This doesn’t hold for another reason: Israel has no intention of stopping. The Lebanon strikes make that plain, and the campaign against Hezbollah is part of the deal. For any of it to stick, somebody has to leash the attack dog — and as Doug said, after all these years it’s still not clear who’s the master and who’s the dog between Israel and the U.S.
Ukraine hasn’t paused either. The Ukrainians threw somewhere between 600 and 1,000 drones at Moscow and lit up Russian oil facilities. Five years in, Putin still treats it like a police action while the other side treats it like a war. That doesn’t end. War is the health of the state, Doug likes to say. States like to stay healthy.
What Doug’s doing about it
Oil is sitting around $75 to $80. Doug doesn’t see it going much below that, and it could run a lot higher if Hormuz spins out again. So he’s still long energy, still long gold and the miners — not because of a headline, but because both are cheap against the rest of the market and both pay you to wait. Real dividend yields, which Doug calls an outward sign of inward grace.
I’m in it with him. The crowd wants the tech melt-up — AI everything, new highs every other day. We’d rather own the stuff nobody’s looking at, that has real value and trades near its real-terms lows.
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