The base bleeds; the top feasts.

Yanis Varoufakis, UnHerd:

The broader tragedy, however, is that this war-as-wealth-transfer mechanism only works so well because the rest of the Western world has lost its capacity to resist. And nowhere is this more painfully evident than in Europe, which suffers the most from the Iran war and understands the least; its leaders stumble about in a daze, mouthing platitudes about “European sovereignty” while doing nothing to achieve it.

Europe’s industries, already reeling from shifting their dependence from cheap Russian gas to prohibitively expensive Texan and New Mexican liquefied natural gas, are being bled dry. They export manufactured goods that require stable supply chains and predictable commodity prices. Alas, the Iran war has sent shipping insurance costs through the roof and rerouted tankers around the Horn of Africa. As oil and gas price volatility cascades directly into European manufacturing costs, the disruption to Gulf energy infrastructure is rippling through every petrochemical-dependent supply chain in Europe.