I know what you’re thinking.

“Cary, that sounds like it was named by a second-grader who ate a full bag of Halloween candy, found his dad’s old war movies, and drew a strategy on a Denny’s placemat with a broken crayon.”

You’d be exactly right. Except this particular second-grader has a nuclear football, a military budget that makes the next ten countries look like they’re fundraising with a bake sale, and a pathological, diaper-filling terror of one specific four-letter word that rhymes with “loser.” He can’t say it. Won’t say it. It’s the Voldemort of his entire existence. Mention it and his whole face does a thing.

That’s Our Leadership. That’s Washington. That’s the magnificently-turd-polished diplomatic apparatus currently blockading the Strait of Hormuz like it’s a gas station bathroom with one working lock and a “be right back” sign that’s been there since February.

The Strategy

I need you to really bend down for this one. Get your expectations on the floor. Below the floor. Get them in the crawlspace where the possum lives.

Operation Madman is an actual, grown-adult, Iranian, now Pentagon-codeworded, someone-got-paid-a-salary-to-name-this strategy.

The plan — in its full, official, classified-document glory — is to appear completely out of your gourd. Not be out of your gourd. That part apparently takes care of itself. Just appear that way.

The official warfighting doctrine for the biggest energy catastrophe on the planet was coined from a word a kindergartner uses when his juice box leaks.

And it worked.

If by “worked” you mean the Strait of Hormuz — that oiled-up little maritime chokepoint through which twenty percent of the world’s petroleum gets its groove on every single day — is now sealed tighter than a pickle jar that’s been in the back of the fridge since the Obama administration. Closed. Shut. Done. Nighty-night, global energy supply. Don’t let the geopolitical bedbugs bite.

The oil markets go up. The oil markets go down. Nobody tells you anything true. Everybody’s winning. Nobody’s winning. The Strait is open. The Strait is a cork in a bottle. And the bottle is on fire. But fine.

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The Intellectual Ancestor of All This Dumbassery

The lineage runs through a man named Daniel Ellsberg — yes, that Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers guy, a former friend of this show — the man who marched into Washington with a briefcase stuffed with inconvenient truths and handed the entire national security apparatus a suppository it had not consented to.

Back in 1959 — when your parents were still cheerful, cars had fins for absolutely no aerodynamic reason whatsoever, and the apocalypse at least had the decency to feel distant — Ellsberg delivered a lecture called:

“The Political Uses of Madness.”

He was studying Hitler’s trick of performing irrationality to make other countries wet themselves and hand over whatever he wanted. The logic was simple and stomach-turning:

If you act crazy enough, people give you what you want just to get you to sit back down and stop making that face.

The Stalemate

And here we are — waddling around in a full, pants-soiled stalemate.

You know what a stalemate is in nuclear-age geopolitics? It’s two overgrown toddlers playing chicken in a stolen golf cart on a one-lane road, both of them absolutely positive the other one will swerve, neither willing to admit they blew past the exit forty miles ago and are now technically in a different country.

Washington can’t back down — because he’d be, say it with me — a loser.

Iran won’t negotiate because the last time they showed up to the table, they got bombed as a thank-you gift.

So here we sit, you and I, while the planet’s entire energy supply is being monetized, weaponized, propagandized, and monetized again — and you are personally funding every drop of it at the pump, the grocery store, and wherever else the invisible hand of the market has found a new orifice to invoice.

Order Now

Let’s Be Fair

Fairness is what separates us from the animals — and from certain cable networks whose names rhyme with “Rocks Gnus.”

Because beneath all this spectacular theater, beneath the madman cosplay and the Hormuz puppet show, there is a sixty-year illegal military occupation.

Sixty years.

That’s not a conflict. That’s not even a “situation.” That’s a lifestyle. That’s a timeshare you can never get out of and nobody will buy. And yet here we are — still acting surprised, still calling it breaking news, still scheduling the panel discussion — as if sixty years of the same thing is anything other than a choice somebody keeps making every single morning before breakfast.

Before we bring on one of the smartest experts alive to explain all of this, let’s recap what we’re actually dealing with:

A war with a codename that sounds like what happens when a frat pledge drinks something he shouldn’t and wakes up zip-tied to a lawn ornament

A blockaded strait that world leaders simultaneously swear is open and closed — like a geopolitical bathroom stall with a broken latch that everyone’s pretending works fine while the line outside wraps around the block

A dollar so jittery it’s checking WebMD at 3am and updating its will

A two-state solution so old it has a pension and a bad hip and still nobody’s done anything about it

A nuclear non-acknowledgment policy so transparently stupid it makes peek-a-boo look like a binding legal contract

A Leadership whose entire grand strategic doctrine — their magnum opus, the thing they apparently sat down and decided was the cornerstone of twenty-first century American power projection — is to act like they ate a fistful of crayons, washed it down with paint thinner, and hope the other guy soils himself first

You think this isn’t the greatest era in human history? Honey. You’re not failing to see the magnificence — you’re just not crouched down far enough yet. Get on your belly. Face in the carpet. There you go. Now look up. It’s beautiful.

My Guest

Today’s guest wrote about all of this with the kind of clarity that makes powerful people deeply uncomfortable — which is precisely how you know it’s worth reading.

Professor Thomas Ehrlich Reifer worked shoulder-to-shoulder with Noam Chomsky and the late Daniel Ellsberg. He chairs the Sociology Department at the University of San Diego, with affiliations spanning Latin American Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, Asian Studies, Cognitive Science, and Ethnic Studies. He’s written for the Journal of Palestine Studies and Antisemitism Studies.

His latest piece at Global Policy —

“The Unfolding World War, The Political Uses of Madness, and the Fate of Republics”

— is generating more international response than anything he’s ever published, including from leading authorities on the Middle East, Iran, and U.S.-Iranian relations.

The full conversation in the video above and wherever you get podcasts. Search: The Cary Harrison Files.

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