Deep dive: Middle East

Is WW3 coming? Or are we just watching a sophisticated theater?

(Geo)politics analyst is a really fancy name for someone who watches real life soap opera and predicts who will date who at the season finale. But do not hate the player, hate the game. As with US politics, what we are witnessing in the Middle East is nothing short of a B-class TV show that your grandma watched when you came by on a Sunday afternoon. The men in power make sure that we get just enough info to remain engaged and drive traffic to news websites. But what happens behind closed doors is the juicy stuff and we can only wonder what is said there.

While OSINT accounts on X keep you engaged with surface-level drama, my job here is to take this noise, filter it and put it in the proper framework, in effect deducting what is really happening behind closed doors. Not an easy fit as valuable snippets are few and far between, but data says that good forecasters are achieving better results than CIA analysts with plenty more information. The task is far from hopeless.

So in this piece, I will present a detailed framework, a model you might say with the aim of showing if the cover photo of this article really got the situation right. I know some of you are still partisan, or naive, or too blindly trusting your opinions without verifying them, but I am not writing this to appeal to your biases. I am writing this to show you most probable scenario(s). As usual, I will focus on parties to the conflict, casus beli, incentives and finally outcomes.

I will not always be right. This is probabilistic analysis. But I will not sell you cheap propaganda. I bet based on these analyses. My money is on the line. My incentives are not clicks, engagement or attention. My incentive is making money on my bets. And my intention with this newsletter is to give you insight into how I do it. If you are a Trump supporter and it angers you to see that in my opinion he was unprepared for the hot swap and lost all the advantage he managed to gain then stop reading and go back to your propaganda pundits. If you are a Kamala supporter and it angers you to see that in my opinion her refusal to do unscripted appearances will be a liability in her campaign, stop reading this. This is not for you.

That being said, if you are still reading this, go ahead, pick my brain a bit and leave a comment if you disagree or have some insights - discussion is a powerful tool that allows us to accept the differences in opinions and make one step forward in our pursuit of truth.

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Baseline

I spent a lot of time figuring out how to write this piece. The topic is complex and not everything is straightforward. On the grand chessboard, as Zbigniew Brzezinski called it, there are many pieces and each player thinks several moves ahead. We need to tackle the problem piece by piece while revealing my thesis.