Overnight September 8–9, the US destroyed or disabled five Iranian oil tankers — the largest single strike of the war — after Iran twice fired ballistic missiles at a US warship, and Iran claims to have hit ten ships in return, the biggest declared wave of tit-for-tat shipping attacks since the war began; separately, Iran doubled domestic gasoline prices and deployed security forces nationwide, an explicit echo of the fuel-price unrest that killed roughly 1,500 in 2019.
This site tracks the signals that determine whether the world runs smoothly — energy supply chains, maritime shipping, geopolitics, food systems, health, and climate. The underlying thesis: the post-WWII Western liberal order is in structural decline, and China has already replaced it as the world’s industrial center of gravity. Not as a prediction. As a description of the present. Updated weekly from primary sources.