Overnight, Iran launched a large missile barrage at American bases across the region, retaliation for the US strikes on Iranian territory. What happened when those missiles arrived depends entirely on who is telling the story. Washington's version, amplified across Fox and official briefings, is a clean one: the missiles were intercepted, Iran has been militarily defeated, and the Strait of Hormuz has been demined. The analysts we track dispute every part of it.
Larry Johnson is the bluntest. "Trump's claims of intercepting all the missiles and of a demined Strait are lies," he said on Dialogue Works.¹ Daniel Davis reached the same conclusion from the evidence: satellite imagery shows Iranian missiles got through despite the official claim that all eight were intercepted, and the demining boast collapses on inspection, since a ship struck a mine in the Strait days earlier and no American minesweepers were ever sent.² His question cuts to the center of the official narrative: "So if they've been militarily defeated, then what were those missiles that flew into Jordan yesterday?"²
Iran's own framing deserves the same scrutiny, and Tehran's vows of overwhelming reprisal are claims, not yet facts. But Johnson argues the pattern of restraint is over. "The days of tit-for-tat are over: you hit us, we're going to hit you much harder, over and over again," he said, noting that CENTCOM is reactivating its battle staff and predicting the exchange will run for days, not hours.¹ He also disputes the theory that pressure will crack the Iranian state: "They want to force the Islamic Republic to collapse. Not going to happen. Every one of these attacks further increases support for the Iranian government."¹ The gap between the briefing room and the battlefield is now the story itself.
A war built on a shifting rationale
How the United States got here is the question Davis has spent the week answering. His account is specific: there was no Iranian nuclear threat that required war. A deal was on the table with Omani negotiators two days before the strikes. "There was no threat to our national security. There was no imminent threat. There was no threat at all. We were in the middle of negotiations," he said.³ He traced how the justification itself has migrated: "It went from 'we knew Israel was going to attack, so we had to preempt it' to 'oh, I remember now, it was two weeks away from a nuclear weapon,' and that's absurd at face value."³ His conclusion names a single cause.
“America got into this war because of Benjamin Netanyahu. Everything else that was claimed has been a lie to cover it over.”
Johnson's reporting converges on the same point from the Israeli side. Netanyahu, he says, is privately bragging that he dragged the United States into the war, boasting of the Americans that "they're my bitch," while Israel pays no comparable price and America absorbs Iran's retaliation.¹ Johnson's judgment of the president is equally stark: "Trump is walking right into the Iranian trap."¹ Davis wants the conclusion drawn without euphemism: "This war was fraudulent from the beginning and it needs to end like yesterday."³ Two analysts, working from different sources, arrive at one verdict: this was a war of choice, chosen by someone else.
Ukraine: the war the West cannot name
While attention swings to the Gulf, the other war is reaching its own conclusion. John Mearsheimer states it without hedging: "There's no question in my mind that the Russians are winning on the battlefield, that the Ukrainians are losing."⁴ His accounting is material, not rhetorical: a four-to-one population advantage, a two-to-three-fold edge in frontline troops, decisive superiority in artillery and glide bombs, and a Black Sea blockade that has, in his words, "turned Ukraine into a landlocked country."⁴ The political symptoms follow the military ones. "When you have to simultaneously fire your minister of defense and the commanding general of your armed forces, that tells you that you are in serious trouble," he said of Zelensky's purge of his defense minister and top general.⁴ Even a ceasefire tomorrow, he argues, leaves "a dysfunctional rump state."⁴
Alexander Mercouris supplies the daily texture behind that judgment: massive nightly Russian drone and missile strikes on energy, defense-industrial and logistics targets in Kiev and Odessa, the failure of Ukraine's Zaporozhye counteroffensive, and the full encirclement of Orikhiv, which he expects to fall within weeks.⁵ Western diplomats, he reports, are being told to leave Kiev, and he wonders aloud whether those warnings turn, in the coming weeks, into an actual withdrawal of Western embassies.⁵ His summary of the Western predicament doubles as an indictment of its press coverage: "We still can't openly admit the glaring, obvious, massive truth that the West is losing in Ukraine."⁵ On this file there is no split among the analysts we track, only degrees of bluntness.
The bill arrives: bonds, the dollar, diesel
The markets, unlike the briefings, cannot be spun, and this week they moved together. Mercouris tracks a synchronized selloff in government bonds, with US, UK, French, German and Japanese yields all surging since the Iran war began, and notes that the incoming Fed chair pick is now expected to raise rates rather than cut them.⁵ Johnson reads the same tape the same way: global bond markets are selling off and the dollar is taking a beating because of the widening war.¹ This is not, in their telling, a routine fiscal story. It is a war premium.
The longer arc is the currency itself. Johnson reports that Iran is now accepting yuan for its oil and banking with Chinese banks, distancing itself from the dollar.¹ Jeffrey Sachs, on The Duran, argues that dollar weaponization since the 2000s is backfiring, and that Treasury Secretary Bessent's warnings of "economic D-Day" against countries that de-dollarize prove the point rather than refute it.⁶ "If you have to make threats to keep countries using the dollar, you're already lost. It's already over," Sachs said.⁶ Lawrence Wilkerson goes further on the timeline, expecting SWIFT to be replaced by currency baskets and the yuan within a decade or less.⁷
The nearest-term risk is physical, not financial. Wilkerson warns that a US diesel and jet-fuel crunch will hit "like a blunderbuss" within three or four weeks, and that stolen Venezuelan crude cannot fill the gap because no multinational will spend the roughly one hundred billion dollars needed to revive Venezuelan production.⁷ Johnson makes the same shortage his central prediction: it will be a train wreck in the US economy, the fuel crunch above all, that finally forces Trump to conclude the war has gone too far and pull back.¹ If they are right, the decisive front of this war is not in the Gulf at all. It is at the American gas pump, on a clock measured in weeks.
How it ends, in their words
Beyond the analysts already quoted, several more voices this week converged on one underlying judgment: the era in which Washington could dictate outcomes is closing.
Two wars, one bond market, and an official story that the evidence keeps contradicting. The analysts we track disagree on timelines and emphasis, but on the direction of events they are close to unanimous, and the direction is away from Washington's control.
Sources
- Larry Johnson, *Dialogue Works* · Calls the intercept-everything and demined-Strait claims lies; predicts a multi-day Iranian retaliation and a fuel-driven economic train wreck watch ▶ 2:09
- Daniel Davis (with Robert Barnes), *Daniel Davis / Deep Dive* · Presses the contradictions in the official story: missiles into Jordan, a mined Strait, no minesweepers sent watch ▶ 24:14
- Daniel Davis, *Daniel Davis / Deep Dive* · On the war's origin: a deal on the table two days before the strikes, and a rationale that keeps changing watch ▶ 1:10
- John Mearsheimer, *John Mearsheimer* · Russia winning the war of attrition on every axis; Ukraine a landlocked, dysfunctional rump state watch ▶ 19:36
- Alexander Mercouris, *Alexander Mercouris* · Orikhiv encircled, embassies told to leave Kiev, Western bond yields surging since the Iran war watch ▶ 84:35
- Jeffrey Sachs, *The Duran* · Dollar weaponization is backfiring; threats to enforce dollar use prove the system is already fragile watch ▶ 47:30
- Lawrence Wilkerson, *Dialogue Works* · A diesel and jet-fuel crunch within three or four weeks; dollar dominance eroding toward currency baskets and the yuan watch ▶ 11:20
- Joe Kent, *Glenn Diesen* · A war aimed at total surrender has no conventional endpoint; the nuclear option arrives quickly watch ▶ 54:10
By Ruins Report, a daily synthesis of what our tracked analysts said, not original reporting. Every numbered claim is sourced, dated, and timestamped above.
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