The numbers do the talking.
He walked through the Strategic Petroleum Reserve: depending on what floor the Pentagon insists on holding, the US has somewhere between two and fourteen weeks of drawdown left at current rates.
Meanwhile demand hasn't fallen, pump prices aren't high enough to dent it, yet supply is still short millions of barrels a day.
Prices should be screaming up. They aren't.
That gap is what unsettles him.
Oil "should be skyrocketing," he says, and instead it's sliding, with speculative short positioning at record extremes.
He can't fully explain it, and he's honest about that, but the strategic implication is clean: Iran can simply wait.
Keep some barrels missing from the strait, let America burn through its reserves, and the pressure sits entirely on the US side of the table.
His Sun Tzu line framed the whole thing: never interrupt your enemy while he's making a mistake.
If China and Iran are reading the same data, the smart move is to let Washington drain its cushion, then pull the plug.
His bottom line matched what I keep hearing: there's no clean win left here.
The least-bad option is for Trump to walk away before the clock runs out.
@chrismartenson
