Global Tantrum! with Steve Palley and Prof. Galen Jackson

Iran Isn't USA's "Suez Moment," But It Sure Isn't A Win

After a bruising war with Iran, the editorials wrote themselves: the Strait of Hormuz closed, US bases hit, interceptors burned, and nothing decisive to show for it. Pundits reached for the ultimate decline metaphor. Could this be America’s “Suez Moment,” referring here to the the 1956 foreign policy fiasco / humiliation that ended Britain and France’s time as major independent global actors? We don’t buy it. Suez worked as a death knell because there was a senior partner, the United States, able to bankrupt London and Paris if they failed to toe the line. In 2026 there’s no one who can play that role against Washington. Suez was a story about can’t. America’s problem is won’t, and occasionally will, but in the wrong place at the wrong time. That distinction matters because the real game isn’t the Persian Gulf; it’s East Asia. So the question becomes whether a loss to Iran dents US credibility where it counts: around the Taiwan Strait. One school says credibility is one interconnected currency; another, the “differentiated credibility” camp, says what matters is the local balance, not what you did three theaters away. We work through the Suez history, the balancing-vs-bandwagoning problem in the Middle East, what allies in Seoul and Taipei actually learned watching this war, and why in international politics “you can come back, but you (maybe) can’t come back all the way.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit globaltantrum.substack.com [https://globaltantrum.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Cuba Goes Dark

After the US deposed Maduro and installed Delcy Rodriguez in Caracas, Venezuela stopped shipping oil to Cuba. That oil, heavily subsidized in exchange for Cuban doctors, teachers, and security advisors since the Chávez era, was the foundation of the Cuban economy. The last Russian tanker arrived in March. Now there’s no replacement coming and Cubans are living through 22-hour-a-day blackouts. This isn’t a humanitarian story dressed up as geopolitics. The USS Nimitz strike group is parked under Southern Command. Trump’s DOJ just indicted 94-year-old Raul Castro for the 1996 Brothers to the Rescue shootdown, 30 years after the fact, and conveniently right as the vice tightens. The administration is offering $100 million in food aid, but only through the Catholic Church. Why now? Cuba imports 70% of its food, has no fuel, no electricity, no Soviet patron, and a regime that depends on Venezuelan oil it can no longer get. Meanwhile, the presence of Russian, Chinese, and Iranian military and intelligence assets on Cuban soil a mere 90 miles from US territory has raised the administration’s hackles. So the question isn’t whether something happens. It’s what: civil collapse, a quiet Castro exit, a Maduro-style “tyrant change,” or something messier. We work through the historical parallels (yes, Bay of Pigs comes up), the strategic logic of squeezing Havana now, and why we’re skeptical about US troops on the ground, even if the indictment hints otherwise. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit globaltantrum.substack.com [https://globaltantrum.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Xi Cleans House

Since 2022, more than 100 senior People’s Liberation Army officers have been removed, disappeared, or placed under investigation, and last week two former defense ministers, Wei Fenghe and Li Shangfu, were handed suspended death sentences that will commute to life imprisonment without parole. The Central Military Commission, which is supposed to have seven members, is down to two: Xi himself and a discipline specialist. Xi’s hand-picked vice chairman, the PLA’s top professional soldier, is now under investigation. It’s tempting to read this as pure power consolidation, a Stalin-style coup-proofing where the dictator clears out anyone who could plausibly threaten him. There’s some of that. But it doesn’t fit on its own. The PLA was, by all accounts, a deeply broken institution: officer commissions bought and sold, Rocket Force silos with blast doors that wouldn’t open, missiles found filled with water instead of fuel. Xi seems to genuinely care that the party’s military can fight. So why now, and why this hard? Two readings, probably both true. Yes, he’s removing potential rivals and reasserting Communist Party control over a force that had drifted into a kind of fiefdom. But he’s also clearing deadwood ahead of what he plainly considers the main event of the next decade: Taiwan. The PLA hasn’t fought a real war since 1979 against Vietnam, and got humiliated then. If you’re planning to do amphibious combined-arms operations across the strait, a patronage racket won’t get you there. We compare this to Stalin’s late-1930s purges, which gutted Soviet readiness right before Barbarossa, talk through what it means that the man Xi appointed to actually run the army is the one being disappeared, and ask the uncomfortable question: does a leaner, less corrupt, more politically loyal PLA make a Taiwan move more likely or less? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit globaltantrum.substack.com [https://globaltantrum.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Project Mythos & AI's Zero-Day Edge

On April 7, Scott Bessent and Jerome Powell pulled the CEOs of the biggest U.S. banks into Treasury for an urgent, closed-door briefing — not about rates, not about liquidity, but about an AI model. Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview is apparently an order of magnitude better than anything currently public at finding software vulnerabilities. Rather than release it, Anthropic built a consortium called Project Glasswing and gave the major platform companies early access to patch before the capability proliferates. The warning shot landed loud: Mozilla used Mythos to find and fix 271 previously unknown vulnerabilities in Firefox 150. On the prior version, Anthropic’s best publicly available model had surfaced 22. That’s a one-version jump from a couple dozen to several hundred. When a process improves by an order of magnitude overnight, you pay attention. The reason policymakers are rattled isn’t that Mythos will suddenly own your bank account tomorrow — Anthropic is keeping the model caged, and non-state actors can’t train their own. The fear is the gap period: a stretch of months where a Mythos-class capability exists, hasn’t been fully used for defense yet, and could be replicated by a nation-state adversary with the means and the motive. China can probably build one. Iran and Russia probably can’t — yet. Whichever side gets through the world’s legacy open-source libraries first owns the window. The underappreciated story is that this round of the offense-defense arms race may actually tip toward the defense. Mythos didn’t find bugs an elite human researcher couldn’t have caught; it just did it at machine speed and machine scale. Applied to new code, that points at a future where shipped software arrives without the kind of rotten foundations that made Equifax, NotPetya, and every critical-infrastructure nightmare possible. The catch is that the patching has to get done before the capability gets out. Glasswing is supposed to run through the summer. That’s the runway. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit globaltantrum.substack.com [https://globaltantrum.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Iran War: Are We Done Yet?

The ceasefire’s held for over a week. The rockets, drones, and fighter-bombers are all taking a breather. The Strait of Hormuz might be opening (except to Iranian traffic, perhaps). The Gulf Arab states are expressing (very) cautious optimism. Israel might be holding its fire in Lebanon during its own separate, but linked, conflict with Hizbullah. And the Trump Administration may be on its way to back to Islamabad to try to secure a deal before the ceasefire formally lapses next week. This is all good news… but does it really mean the war’s over? And even if it is, will it result in a lasting peace? Many issues remain unresolved, including the status of Iran’s nuclear program; its missile arsenal and regional proxy forces; and, of course, who will control the Strait of Hormuz on an ongoing basis. Plenty of claims on these points are coming out of the Trump Administration; Iran, for the time being, is mostly silent. Increased American pressure, applied to Iranian intransigence, could result in outcomes ranging from a grand bargain to a redoubling of hostilities. The global economy, the U.S. midterm elections, and the longterm future of the fossil fuel system all hang in the balance. This week, we’ve invited friend of the show Prof. Andrew Leber back on, and complemented him with our grad school buddy Prof. Paasha Mahdavi of UCSB—an expert on the politics of energy—to help us make sense of this increasingly confounding situation. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit globaltantrum.substack.com [https://globaltantrum.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]