The most striking thing about Pepe Escobar's reading of the new Iran situation is not its prediction, but its claim about the present. As he tells it — sitting somewhere in Asia, talking to Judge Andrew Napolitano on a Wednesday afternoon East Coast time — the war the United States and Israel just fought against Iran has not, in any meaningful sense, ended. It has only changed shape. The bombs have stopped. The blockade has not. And in the strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of the world's oil passes, an entirely new set of rules now applies — written, enforced, and (importantly) priced in Iranian rial by a body called the Persian Gulf Authority that did not exist a month ago.
Escobar is a particular voice. Brazilian by birth, journalist by trade, longtime correspondent for Asia Times and contributing editor at outlets across what he would call the multipolar world. He has spent the last fifteen years arguing — to use his own phrase — that wealth and power are pivoting east, and that Washington either hasn't noticed or has decided to fight it with bombs. He is not a neutral observer of the events he is describing. The strength of his analysis is that he is unusually well-sourced in Tehran, Moscow, and Beijing, and that his framework has been remarkably stable for over a decade. The weakness is the same: he reports the world as it appears to that framework, and the framework is openly hostile to American and Israeli intentions.
Read him for what he can see that almost no one else in the English-language press is bothering to see. Discount, where you must, for a perspective that is openly committed.
What follows is a guided version of the conversation — edited for clarity, with context boxes where the references and concepts presume background most readers don't have.
Continues themes from N° 01 · The strait of Hormuz returns here from a very different angle — and the Suez analogy reappears, with Escobar reaching for the same 1956 template Dalio used.Three tracks, running in parallel
Who's at the table, what just happened, and what's at stake. The piece begins with a question about back-channel negotiations — and an answer that resets the timeline.
Escobar describes a moment with three distinct tracks running at once. The first is a back-channel exchange of proposals between Washington and Tehran, mediated by Pakistan — fourteen detailed points from the Iranian side, with three core demands stacked in priority order: end all wars against Iran and the "axis of resistance"; settle the question of the strait of Hormuz; and only then, possibly, discuss a new nuclear deal modeled on a diluted version of the JCPOA that the first Trump administration tore up in 2018.
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was a 2015 agreement between Iran and the so-called P5+1 — the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia, China, and Germany. Iran agreed to cap its uranium enrichment and accept enhanced international inspections; in exchange, sanctions on its economy were lifted.
In May 2018, President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the deal, calling it "the worst deal ever." Iran progressively walked back its commitments after that, and subsequent negotiations under both the Biden administration and the second Trump administration have stalled or collapsed. When Escobar refers to a "diluted JCPOA" as the eventual third stage of any settlement, he means: get back roughly to where things were ten years ago, with weaker terms.
The second track is the Iran–Russia–China triangle Escobar has been writing about for years. Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi met Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg one week, and met China's Wang Yi in Beijing the next. The third track is Donald Trump's own scheduled summit with Xi Jinping in Beijing on May 14 and 15 — at the time of this conversation, eight days away. The three tracks are interacting in real time.
Are the US and Iran negotiating with each other through an intermediary, or is this just another confabulation from the president?
There are talks. But it's a back and forth of several points from one side to the other. The Iranians sent the Americans, via the Pakistanis, fourteen points — very detailed, essentially the same ones from the beginning. After the breakdown a while ago, three key points stick out, in order. The first is to end the war, and end all wars, against Iran and against the axis of resistance. The second is a discussion in detail about the strait of Hormuz. And the third stage is a discussion about a possible new nuclear deal — a sort of diluted JCPOA, the one Trump 1.0 destroyed.
Let me start at the end. Does the United States finally recognize that no amount of bombing will change the attitude of the Iranians about their right to enrich uranium for civilian, domestic purposes?
No. They have not understood that yet. And that is one of the main sticking points — probably the main sticking point, apart from the ballistic missiles, the drones, and so on.
A parliamentary body has redefined the strait
The most concrete development Escobar describes — and the one most easily missed in coverage focused on whether the bombs will fall again — has the bureaucratic name of an obscure customs office.
It is called the Persian Gulf Authority. At the time of the conversation it is less than two days old. It has published four operational rules for any vessel transiting the strait of Hormuz through Iranian territorial waters. Escobar walks through them deadpan; the implications are large.
Three things to notice. First: the toll is denominated in Iranian rial, with the Chinese yuan as backup. Dollar payments are not contemplated. Second: there is no neutral arbiter. The Authority assesses, the Authority invoices, the Authority controls the only navigable lane in waters Iran has long claimed — and the conversation reminds us that those waters extend twelve nautical miles from the coast, not two. Third: countries that participated in the recent war, even by hosting US aircraft on their soil, may be billed for damages before being granted passage. Escobar raises questions about, say, NATO bases in Italy used to refuel American planes — without claiming to know how it will actually be enforced.
The "American lane" Marco Rubio referred to in his press conference, Escobar says, is empty. No insurer would cover transit through it. No tanker owner would risk it. The only working corridor is the Authority's.
Is the Iranian blockade a blockade in the literal traditional sense, with ships preventing the movement of other ships? Or are they using the insurance market as the instrument of the blockade — because no owner of a ship or cargo would allow it to go there without insurance?
Without insurance, exactly. And it's not a blockade. It's a toll booth. They've been tweaking the toll booth from the beginning. In the beginning it accepted only yuan; sometimes it accepted cash if you didn't have petroyuan, crypto, the Chinese international payment system CIPS. Now they're formalizing it in Iranian rial — this is what the parliament in Iran is approving. They're already discussing with the Omanis: if you want a toll booth on the Omani side, no problem, do it your way. This is our way, through our territorial waters, and nobody is going to contest it.
"Operation Epic Fury is concluded"
A press conference and an item-by-item rebuttal. The strongest beat in the conversation — and the one closest to comedy.
A few hours before the conversation, Secretary of State Marco Rubio had told reporters that "Operation Epic Fury is concluded" and that the United States had "achieved the objectives of that operation." Escobar, on Napolitano's invitation, walks through the stated objectives one by one and asks whether they were in fact achieved.
The broader point Escobar makes here is that this kind of mismatch between official framing and operational reality is how empires lose authority before they lose battles. He reaches, as Ray Dalio did from a very different starting point in the previous Lecturas piece, for the analogy of the 1956 Suez crisis: the moment when Britain's claim to be a global power and the world's perception of that claim parted company. Where Dalio used Suez as a marker of British decline already in the past tense, Escobar uses it as a template for what he believes is happening to American credibility in real time.
A structural alignment, not a contingent one
The argument Escobar wants to make is bigger than any single week. It traces back to a Russian foreign policy concept from the late 1990s — and an idea about how the post-American world is being assembled.
The structural claim Escobar wants to make is that the war on Iran has clarified — and accelerated — an alignment between Russia, China, and Iran that he traces to a Russian foreign policy concept from the late 1990s. The original "Primakov triangle" was Russia–India–China, proposed by Yevgeny Primakov as a strategic counterweight to American unipolarity. What Escobar argues is now operating is a variant: Russia–Iran–China, formed not by deliberate design but by the pressure of shared circumstance.
Yevgeny Primakov served as Russia's foreign minister from 1996 to 1998 and as prime minister from 1998 to 1999. He is widely credited as the architect of post-Soviet Russian foreign policy as it took shape after the chaos of the early Yeltsin years. His core proposition was that Russia could not, and should not, accept a unipolar world organized around American power; instead, it should build strategic partnerships across Eurasia to reconstitute a multipolar order.
His most concrete formulation of this was the RIC triangle — Russia, India, China — proposed in the late 1990s as a coordinating framework. The BRICS grouping later built partially on it. Escobar's substitution of Iran for India is his own analytical move, not Primakov's; the original triangle is still RIC, and India and Iran sit in very different geopolitical positions.
The evidence Escobar offers is the diplomatic week just past. Iranian foreign minister Araghchi met Putin in St. Petersburg for a meeting that ran an hour and a half — unusually long, in Escobar's reading, for a head of state to spend with another country's foreign minister. Putin then immediately called Trump, in Escobar's account suggesting an "off-ramp" while warning against further escalation. Days later Araghchi was in Beijing, where Wang Yi reportedly told him in person that the war against Iran was, in the Chinese government's official position, "illegitimate" — a stronger formulation than Russia's, and one with implications for how China handles the upcoming summit.
Do the Americans understand the Russia–Iran–China triangle?
No. In academia, a few. Mearsheimer understands it. Professor Sachs understands it. Does Rubio? Does Witkoff, Kushner, the president, Hegseth? No. Absolutely no idea. It's a toxic combination of stupidity and nastiness. The whole grifter circle — nastiness has never been so stupid, and stupidity has never been so nasty.
The line is harsh, and it is Escobar's. It is also the kind of formulation that, on his own terms, only makes sense if you already share his diagnosis — that the people running the United States today are not simply pursuing a different theory of national interest, but are failing to perceive a structural shift the rest of the world has long since priced in. Whether that's correct is the question. Whether he's reporting what Tehran, Moscow, and Beijing actually believe about Washington — that, on his sourcing, is hard to dispute.
The nine days that constrain everything
Trump is scheduled to land in Beijing on May 14. The question is what can happen between now and then.
The conversation closes on the practical question Napolitano keeps returning to: what happens next. Escobar's answer is structural rather than predictive. Trump has a scheduled summit with Xi Jinping in Beijing on May 14 and 15. The advance team is already there. The president's cars and clothing are already there. Bombing Iran in the eight days remaining would mean either flying to Beijing while the bombs are still falling — which Xi would almost certainly take as an insult requiring the cancellation of the meeting — or canceling the trip himself and arriving at the next available Xi meeting with even fewer cards than he is currently holding.
Escobar treats the carrier's withdrawal as a tell. The USS Gerald R. Ford — the United States' newest super-carrier, $13 billion, five thousand sailors aboard, recently in Cyprus for repairs to (he notes) its toilets — has slipped through Gibraltar and is heading home. It is not a vessel positioned for renewed war. Whether this means Trump will hold off until after the summit, or whether (as some of Escobar's Tehran sources suggest) the Iranians are themselves prepared for war to resume "this weekend," is the open question. Escobar is, on balance, betting on restraint. But he keeps the qualifier in.
Is it your view, given the movement of this monster ship and the fact that the advance team is already there, that the Beijing trip is on, and therefore there will be no bombing between now and then?
As it stands, judge — yes. But we never know. Considering the volatility of the main character in this play, anything can happen from one minute to another.
What is still uncertain. The mines in the central strait will take months to clear; who clears them is not yet decided. The fourteen-point Iranian proposal has been, in Escobar's word, "smashed" by the American team but not formally rejected. The Persian Gulf Authority is operational, but its enforcement against, say, an Italian-flagged tanker linked to a NATO base that hosted American operations remains theoretical. Whether the Beijing summit produces anything more substantive than ceremony depends on conversations that have not yet happened.
What is not uncertain, in Escobar's telling. The toll booth is open and pricing in rial. The triangle is meeting. The summit is scheduled. The dollar's role in Persian Gulf transit has, at minimum, paused. The American carrier is heading home.
The reader's job here is what it always is with a committed analyst: to take what they can see better than anyone else, and to apply their own correction for the lens. Escobar can see the strait, the triangle, and the summit very clearly. Whether all three add up to the empire transition he has been predicting for fifteen years, or to something more contingent and reversible, is — as Dalio said in different terms in the previous piece — a question of how patterns end.