So it is once again war or peace in the Middle East?

Matein Khalid

Something is dangerously wrong in a world where the price of gold rises 30% and silver surges a surreal 65% in a single month, as we witnessed in January 2026. True, an American carrier strike force with a full complement of 80 F-18 Hornet war planes and missile destroyers laden with Tomahawk cruise missiles has sailed from the South China Sea into the Gulf. Once again, as in January 15 1991, October 07 2001 and March 20 2003, the United States is on the precipice of war in the Middle East and history is about to move fast forward towards an endgame none of us can predict. Only one thing is certain now, the US dollar is no longer a Pavlovian safe haven asset for the world’s macro hedge funds and Big Money financial gunslingers. Gold has replaced the greenback – for now.

In the 1990’s, my default FX trade whenever an American President opted to strike Baathist Iraq was to buy the Norwegian kroner and sell the Turkish lira as a classic Gulf oil geopolitics trade but I will not do this now since the geopolitical risk premium in Brent at 70 is still far too low and the Nokki is not the petrocurrency rock star it used to be while the Turkish lira is no longer the high inflation perma-sad sack it was before Grand Vizier Mehmet Şimşek replaced the AKP’s Damad Pasha (this office of the royal son-in-law did not end with the Ottoman Sultans but was resurrected by Sultan Recep Erdoğan of the AKP!).

Why bother playing money games with currencies in Oslo and Istanbul when the hottest action in the world is just to do a carry trade by borrowing dollars to accumulate Dr. Auric and the best gold mining stocks on the planet, notably Newmont, Agnico Eagle and Freeport McMoRan. A gold/copper play I flagged at 38 in a November post, which is now above 64. This is my idea of heaven but the price action in commodities shows that someone out there is expecting the worst when Uncle Sugar strikes the Persian Empire of the Ayatollahs and their despised Agha Zadeh offspring, who did not hesitate to massacre 5,000-8000 young protestors in 3-days to preserve their evil and corrupt dictatorship.

It is significant that protestors even in theocratic strongholds like Mashhad, Qom and Khoemin, a birth place of guess who?, shouted long live the Shah, the ultimate insult to the mullahcracy that has taken Iran to the Dark Ages since 1979 and caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people across Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Kurdistan and the Gulf. Will Trump be their final nemesis? Who knows? Trump can go taco if the deal is sweet enough for him and the difference between mullah and moola is a thin line in Trumpworld as Bloomberg investigative report on Mojtaba Khamenei’s global property empire in London, Paris and Switzerland attests.

I doubt if the Supreme Leader will follow his protégé, the murderous Bashar Assad into exile in Moscow. The martyrdom narrative his regime has peddled to goad countless young teenage Iranian boys and young men to walk on minefields in the trenches of Khorramshahr, Fao and Basra during the war with Iraq in the 1980’s is not for the Big Daddy’s of the Revolution, who prefer to hide in a bunkers when the warplanes of the great satan drop into say hello. As a human being, I desperately hope diplomacy saves Iran and the Gulf from a catastrophic war.

Regime change can best come if the regime transforms itself, which may happen if the Americans somehow eliminate the top 1000 commanders of the IRGC and a kabal of secular nationalist generals in the regular army (Artesh) seize power from the Ayatollahs. That could be the best case scenario for a post-Khameini Iran. Imagine if a new Cyrus Accord brings peace to the Middle East in the name of the Achaemenid Shah who founded the Persian Empire 2500 years ago, released the Jews from slavery in Babylon and wrote the world’s first human rights protocol. Now that would be a world worth living for! Sleep Cyrus for we are awake – piroozi nazdik ast!

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