March 24, 2026

TWENTY MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE? Niall Ferguson: Brace Yourselves. A Recession Is Coming.

Investors should be used to the whiplash by now. The pattern ought to be familiar: The president makes a bold pro-Israel military move in the Middle East. Israel’s principal adversary retaliates by restricting the flow of oil through the Persian Gulf. The economic consequences look so grim—the nightmare combination of stagnation and inflation—that the president hastily switches to diplomacy.

I want nothing to do with the juvenile journalistic debate about whether, by postponing on Monday his threatened attacks on Iranian power plants, Trump “chickened out” the way he rolled back the tariffs in April last year—the way he always chickens out. Please. He doesn’t always chicken out. He carries out roughly half of the threats he makes, which is a pretty effective strategy in game theory, so long as your adversaries are risk averse, which most of them are. Trump most certainly is not. (When the guy who used to run George Soros’s hedge fund says that Trump has “a very high risk tolerance, much higher than mine,” that’s telling you something.)

The reason the pattern of the past four weeks should be familiar is that something very similar happened in 1973–74. The catalyst was Richard Nixon’s decision to airlift a colossal military aid package to Israel—the counterpart to Operation Epic Fury in 2026. Nixon wanted to tilt the balance of power in the Middle East decisively in Israel’s favor following the Arab states’ surprise attack on Yom Kippur, October 6. The retaliation took the form of oil price hikes by the Middle Eastern oil producers, culminating in an embargo on oil exports to the United States imposed on the orders of King Faisal of Saudi Arabia on October 17. The ultimate effect was to nearly quadruple the price of oil on the world market.

Nixon, Kissinger, and other senior officials in the administration had been warned that this might happen. As Martin Indyk showed in his excellent 2021 book, Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy, they had ignored those warnings. Kissinger was dismayed at the situation he now found himself in. As he complained to his staff on October 26, in the 19th century, the Western powers would simply have invaded Saudi Arabia and carved up its oil fields. “The idea that a Bedouin kingdom could hold up Western Europe and the United States would have been absolutely inconceivable,” he fumed. Defense Secretary Jim Schlesinger even drew up a plan to occupy the Arabian oil fields “as a last resort.”

Stunned by the economic consequences and their likely political costs, Nixon instructed Kissinger to get the embargo lifted. The secretary of state made his first trip to Riyadh on November 8. For all Kissinger’s skill as a negotiator, and for all the shuttle diplomacy he undertook, it took more than four months to get the embargo lifted, on March 18, 1974. By that time, the energy supply shock had been enough to push the U.S. economy—and much of the rest of the industrial world—into recession. Is something similar happening right now as a result of Trump’s war?

Related: “Goldman Sachs just bumped its U.S. recession probability to 30% from 25%, underscoring how quickly things are moving.”

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

CHANGE: Volkswagen to shift from cars to missile defense in deal with Israel’s Iron Dome maker.

Volkswagen is in discussions with Israel’s Rafael Advanced Defence Systems regarding a deal that would convert one of the German automaker’s factories from car manufacturing to missile defence production, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday.

The plan involves transforming Volkswagen’s Osnabrück plant to produce components for Rafael’s Iron Dome air defence system, according to the report. The Israeli state-owned company’s system would be manufactured at the German facility under the proposed arrangement.

The deal aims to preserve all 2,300 jobs at the Osnabrück site in western Germany, which has faced potential closure. The two companies plan to market the defence systems to European governments.

The German government is actively supporting the proposal, according to the Financial Times report.

As Noah Pollack, channeling Norm Macdonald:

Related: Volkswagen Could Start Building Military Vehicles. The beginning of the lede is a riot:

Volkswagen is no stranger to the military sector, and the automaker is now exploring the possibility of producing military vehicles at its Osnabrück factory in Germany.

Just don’t mention the war…

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

I’M STILL NOT TIRED OF WINNING:

Posted at 7:07 pm by Glenn Reynolds

THE NEW SPACE RACE: NASA to spend $20 billion on moon base, cancel orbiting lunar station.

Isaacman, who was sworn in at the agency in December, made the ⁠announcement ‌at the opening of a day-long ⁠event at NASA’s Washington headquarters at which he outlined a raft of changes he is making to the agency’s flagship moon program Artemis.

“It should ‌not really surprise anyone that we are pausing Gateway in its current form and focusing on ​infrastructure that supports sustained operations on the lunar surface,” Isaacman told delegates at the event.

The Lunar Gateway station, largely already built by contractors Northrop Grumman
and Vantor, ⁠formerly Maxar, was meant to be a space station parked in ‌a lunar orbit. Repurposing the craft for ‌a lunar surface base is not simple.

“Despite some of the very real hardware and schedule challenges, we can repurpose equipment and ⁠international partner commitments to support surface and other program objectives,” Isaacman ⁠said.

Lunar Gateway was designed to serve as both a research platform and a transfer station for astronauts to board moon landers before descending to the lunar surface.

The Lunar Gateway never made much sense, except as a multibillion dollar kludge to cover for SLS not having enough lift to make Artemis work. The real solution was to cancel SLS and Lunar Gateway, and work with SpaceX to get Starship up and running.

Posted at 4:51 pm by Stephen Green

DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: ‘Bostonian of the Year’ ordered to pay back $224K she stole from her own nonprofit. “Monica Cannon-Grant, the former community organizer who rose to fame leading a massive 2020 Black Lives Matter march through Boston, was ordered Monday by U.S. District Court Judge Angel Kelley to forfeit every dollar she made from her crimes — from diverting donations from her own nonprofit, collecting fraudulent pandemic unemployment benefits, and pocketing rental assistance she wasn’t entitled to.”

Posted at 3:49 pm by Stephen Green

NIFTY: F-22 Raptor “2.0” Spotted Undergoing Flight Testing. “Most obvious on the model are the new stealthy fuel tanks, a critical addition to ensure that the F-22 is able to better cover the vast distances that would be involved in a potential future conflict in the Indo-Pacific. In the past, the Raptor’s notoriously short range has been mitigated by using non-stealthy 600-gallon tanks, but these are not a realistic option when faced by more capable hostile air defenses.”

Posted at 2:47 pm by Stephen Green

MUCH MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE:

 

Posted at 2:40 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE DEEP STATE IS REAL…:

…and doesn’t give a damn about what you “little people” might have voted for

Posted at 2:32 pm by Stephen Green

QUESTION ASKED: Why Are Climate Doomsayers Never Fact-Checked?

The “climate emergency” pushers have pompously predicted planetary doom within ten years for more than 30 years. Why are they never checked? Author Kevin Mooney has a new book titled Climate Porn, and we discuss the remarkable imbalance of climate coverage and the nasty tendency on the Left to punish people who even gently question the panic.

MRC Business Associate Editor Joseph Vazquez joined the conversation. The subtitle of the book is How and Why Anti-Population Zealots Fabricate Science, while Targeting American Capitalism, Freedom, and Independence. In the year we celebrate America’s 250th anniversary, Mooney — who was a colleague of ours with CNSNews.com back when George W. Bush was president — argues that the climate doomsayers threaten a climate crisis to undermine our prosperity and liberty.

One of the most embarrassing alarmists of our times, the biologist Paul Ehrlich — who became famous with his book The Population Bomb in 1968, has just passed away at the age of 95. The New York Times was mocked on X when they suggested “his predictions proved premature.” He predicted mass famines in the 1970s. In 1989 and in 1990, NBC gave over chunks of the Today show to Ehrlich. He was not interviewed. He was the reporter-slash-narrator. We never stop talking about his prediction that soon, you’d tie your boat to the Washington Monument. That never happened.

Bryant Gumbel putting the “That’s good stuff” button at the end just adds to the unintended comedy of this bonkers 1990 clip:

Still though, why take chances? Tax the blue zones.

More wacky aquatic urban predictions here: Mile Markers on the Road to Detroit Atlantis.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

DISPATCHES FROM AL-BRIṬĀNIYĀ:

Posted at 1:59 pm by Stephen Green