A single prediction is a way to be wrong with confidence. By now — roughly two months in, ceasefire fraying — the useful thing isn't "here's what happens." It's a set of weighted scenarios I can update as signals arrive.
Where we are
The April 8 ceasefire is technically holding but degrading by the day. The tell this week: Trump cancelled the Witkoff/Kushner trip to Pakistan and moved talks to "phone only," then said the quiet part out loud — "We have all the cards. They can call us anytime." Iran's foreign ministry denied any direct meeting. Lindsey Graham is publicly pushing to resume military operations.
And one operational detail that quietly raises the ceiling on this whole thing: Iran has reportedly lost track of its own mines in the Strait. Even if a deal gets signed tomorrow, that means the strait can't be fully, safely reopened on a political timeline. The disruption has a physical tail now, independent of anyone's intentions.
WTI is sitting around $90.
The scenario weights
Here's my 30-day distribution as of late April:
| Scenario | Weight |
|---|---|
| Re-escalation — talks collapse, US strikes resume, oil re-spikes $95→$110–120 within ~2 weeks | ~45% |
| Sustained low-grade attrition / status-quo grind | ~35% |
| Genuine de-escalation, strait trickles open, oil eases | ~20% |
I've bumped re-escalation from ~30% to ~45% over the month. The drivers: the negotiation-collapse signaling, the hawk pressure, and the mine problem that makes a clean reopening impossible even in the good case. The scenario I'd warn against dismissing is the boring middle one — the grind. Markets hate pricing "nothing resolves for months," but that's frequently what actually happens.
The reframe I had to make: erosion, not collapse
A chunk of the commentary around this war has slid into "this is the end of the dollar / the fall of the American order." I went looking for that in the data and mostly didn't find it. What I found was slower and less cinematic:
- India broke ranks on February 2 — signed a U.S. trade deal, halted Russian oil purchases in exchange for tariff relief (50% down to 18%). That's a country reading the wind and hedging toward Washington, not away.
- USD share of global reserves is about 58%, down from ~72% in 2000. That's real erosion — but it's a quarter-century trend, not a cliff.
- The yuan is still under 5% of reserves and around 7% of FX volume. Central banks are buying gold (~1,000+ tonnes a year, three years running), which is a hedge, not a regime change.
The right historical analog isn't 1971 or some sudden break. It's the pound's handoff to the dollar — which took roughly three decades, from the 1920s to the 1950s. So I've reframed "empire decline" from a 12–24 month collapse into a 5–15 year erosion. That distinction matters enormously if you're making personal bets on it, which brings me to the only part of this that's actually actionable for me.
What this means off the page
I run this analysis partly because the outputs touch real decisions — whether to accelerate an EV purchase against fuel costs, whether to treat a planned trip as mistimed, which corner of the job market is about to look prescient. The scenario weights feed directly into those. The short version of my current personal posture: hedge the asymmetric, reversible bets; don't make irreversible ones on the collapse tail; and don't confuse "elevated for a long time" with "broken forever."
What I'm watching
- Iran's power grid. A strike there flips me to the bear case immediately.
- Oil under $70 sustained. That flips me to the bull case.
- The mine-clearing question — it's the physical constraint that no amount of diplomacy shortcuts.
Part 3 of a running series. The re-escalation scenario I weighted at 45% is the one to watch. Next entry grades it.