Appreciate it! Yes it definitely grew beyond scope, I had to demonstrate a bit of why the war in Iran is different this time. Primarily the exit of US petrodollar backing to compute/data and how the war in Iran accomplishes lock in on consumer compute (helium) and preventing uptake of Gulf oil as hegemonic backing. Then how political actors are motivated to pursue this goal and the drivers behind the transition from unipolar hegemon to multi-polar regional bloc hegemons. (I also tried to remain accessible… eep)

But yes I am certainly not a writer, I am using creative commons licensing so maybe a better writer than I can take inspiration and distill it for the attention economy.

AI was used during research (but specifically not American compute.)
I used Proton Lumo and Mistral Le Chat, they are not as good as the other AIs but I think are better custodians of my data.

I have all appropriate sources however I only included the australian sourcing under heading: We Can’t Eat Data: Sourced Claims (May 2026) (it was long enough already!)

I used a few books to get the Gulf history such as “Re-examining the Foundations of US-Gulf relations” David B. Roberts “The Evolution of Political Institutions and Dynasties in the Arab Gulf States” from Asian Journal of Academic Research etc etc

and DuckDuckGo is cool but it’s still just Bing results. Give Searx a try (activate/disable desired search engines in config)

Cheers, that pic is one of our farms and a pure magic view on foggy mornings!

Appreciate you taking the time, cheers fam!