Reading the Iran War as a Designed Trap: Fertilizer, Energy, and the Squeeze on China

A Thesis Assembled From Known Outcomes

Ryan Perkins, joining The Duran for the first time, opened with the origin of his hypothesis: he began writing shortly after the war started in March because the initial picture did not look right to him. Reading across ten to twenty years of policy papers and strategic literature, he found two constants — regime change in Iran was consistently judged unlikely to succeed without major ground forces, and any military operation would be answered by Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz. His inference is the episode's foundation: if the closure and the failed regime change were known outcomes, perhaps the closure was the actual intention, timed so the fertilizer and energy shocks would synchronize around September and October.

Three Targets, and India in the Crosshairs

He treated a public remark as early vindication: the video he watched that Friday opened with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent flagging an energy shock (verified against Mediaite's September 2 report, which quotes Bessent saying the country "is going through an energy shock right now" — an "about to enter" rendering on air). The war, in his account, exists to shape the economic landscape in a way that facilitates this trap — and the incompetence narrative, he argued, is the standard bridge between a policy imperative and public acceptance in a democracy.

Two Vulnerabilities: Factories and Offshore Yuan

The weapon, as he maps it, has three targets: China first — an extension of economic containment around China — then the solidarity of BRICS, and finally a warning to the global south about the relative safety of the dollar zone. India sits most exposed: most of its fertilizer and feedstock moves through Hormuz, 80% of its oil imports pass through the strait, and a climbing import bill pressures the rupee. Brazil's exposure runs through fertilizer, where he pointed to wire coverage: Reuters had reported Brazilian soybean farmers losing their edge over US rivals (verified: the Reuters analysis ran June 8, thirteen weeks before this episode — earlier than the "three or four weeks ago" he recalled, but matching the substance). China, he noted, is different — largely self-sufficient in fertilizer, to the point that India asked Beijing for help as the crisis began.

The Unthinkable Option

The two vulnerabilities are the analytic core of the hypothesis. The first is China's small and medium-sized manufacturing sector, which absorbed the early-pandemic global inflation wave on thin margins; government support could then bridge to normal because the disruption was short, while an eighteen-month-to-two-year shock leaves nowhere to bridge to. The second is the offshore RMB pool. China buys about half its oil in RMB — 45% of its Saudi purchases, around a fifth of its UAE purchases, 99% of its Russian ones — and the surplus cannot all be recycled into Chinese goods and services, so it is exchanged on open markets. It is one currency with two exchange rates: dearer oil means more RMB converted abroad, downward pressure on the offshore rate, and a dilemma — the fiscal policy that props up the SME sector is directly opposed to the policy that defends the exchange rate. This, he argues, is the vulnerability a market operator turned Treasury Secretary would exploit.

Reconnaissance and the Plaza Parallel

The dilemma has one exit nobody would take. Asked what would happen if China simply severed the floating RMB from its internal currency, Perkins answered that that would be the moment the entire BRICS financial architecture starts to crumble — the unthinkable option. Defending the rate by hiking instead forecloses the stimulus playbook used last time. Mercouris set the situation against history: the offshore Eurodollar pool that destabilized Bretton Woods, and Soros breaking the Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992 — with Bessent active around the ERM crisis and, in the hosts' account, running similar plays since.

Signs of the Trap — and the Loose Ends

Read through this lens, the tariff war changes meaning: a way for the US to test for vulnerabilities and observe China's retaliation pathways, with the president's scattergun style providing plausible cover. The objective, Perkins clarified, is not to break China but to force a Plaza Accord type agreement — Japan's 1985 revaluation as the template: revaluation crushed the export sector, cheap money inflated asset bubbles, US rate rises burst them, and the lost decade followed. Whether America would benefit is another matter: there is no blueprint for reindustrializing a country, and in his argument the dollar's reserve status is precisely why the United States de-industrialized — with Germany's post-reunification trajectory, in his telling, repeating the pattern Britain ran a century earlier.

The evidence he offers that the trap is working: India staved off the predicted food shortfall only by buying urea at twice the pre-crisis price and passing the cost to farmers at a subsidized rate — moving the strait's economic shock onto the government balance sheet, "the first visible sign," in his words, that the trap works. On BRICS, Mercouris relayed what Russian officials told him in Moscow: the 2024 payment-system push culminating in Kazan stalled under Brazil's presidency, the Brazilians and Indians feared personal US sanctions, and the acrimony was real — an account Perkins says matches his own conversation with Radhika Desai at the Vladivostok forum. On the pipeline, he reports the delay comes from the Chinese side, attempting to work out a new route around Mongolia (verified: Reuters reported the rename to "Power of Baikal" on September 2 — consistent with a route change, though public reporting still describes the Mongolian corridor). He closed on the deep foundation: a public awareness, down to Beijing taxi drivers, that the Iran war is ultimately about China — the substrate, in his account, of a decade of political preparation. Every link in this chain is the speakers' hypothesis; the episode offers it as interpretation, not established fact.