Shawn Ryan

It was always debatable if we could defend it before, but now with all the combat power pushed into CENTCOM...

That's a huge issue.

Another major issue is the strength of the dollar.

The dollar's already been weakened so much because of our deficit spending.

We can deficit spend because we're the world's reserve currency holder.

And a lot of that strength comes from the petrodollar, that any money that gets bought from the GCC or any oil that gets bought from the GCC, you've got to sell the transaction in dollars.

China's already kind of short-circuited.

Right, right.

So if you want to keep that system going, which I'm not sure if it's the best system, but we should at least deliberately move away from it if we're going to do it.

It shouldn't disappear over the course of a month because of a war, because the straits being choked off.

Iran knows this.

They know that if they choke off the straits and they only let Chinese ships, et cetera, come through and they settle the transaction in another currency, that they're eroding away everything.

at the petrodollar, and we also need the GCC to be on board, all the Gulf cooperation countries in the region, they've got to be on board with the petrodollar too.

The reason why they went with the petrodollar is because we provided their security guarantees.

Well, how are their security guarantees now?

We can't defend them against what's taking place.

We can't defend them from Iranian ballistics, Iranian drones.

They know full well that the war was launched by Israel, and now they're suffering the consequence.

So all of a sudden, we're not the best ally.

So how long do we expect them to continue to settle their transactions in the dollar?