All Wars Are Bankers’ Wars — And This One Is No Different

Let me try something different with this article.

No financial jargon. No talk of futures markets or yield curves or swap lines. Just plain English. Because what Alex Krainer — a former hedge fund manager who spoke to academic Glenn Diesen this week — is describing is actually very simple once you strip away the complexity. So simple, in fact, that it has been happening for at least a hundred years. Possibly longer.

Here is the core of it: the people who really run the global economy do not care who wins wars. They profit from the war itself. From both sides. And when the war ends, they move in to collect whatever is left.

That is what is happening right now in the Middle East. And once you understand that, the confusion about why any of this is happening disappears.

Let me tell you a story you were probably never taught in school

During World War II, the United States and Nazi Germany were enemies. Americans fought and died to defeat Hitler. The war was presented — and genuinely experienced by most people — as a battle between good and evil, democracy against fascism.

But here is what was happening behind the scenes.

A New York investment bank called the Union Banking Corporation was doing business with Fritz Thyssen — the German steel magnate who personally financed Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. The bank was transferring funds, gold, steel, coal, and bonds between the United States and Nazi Germany — even after America had entered the war.

One of the seven directors of that bank was a man named Prescott Bush.

Prescott Bush was the grandfather of President George W. Bush and the father of President George H.W. Bush. This is documented in declassified US National Archives files, confirmed by The Guardian, the Associated Press, and the Washington Times. In 1942, the United States government finally seized the bank’s assets under the Trading with the Enemy Act. Prescott Bush was never prosecuted. Eight years later, he was elected to the United States Senate from Connecticut.

According to former New York Times journalist Charles Higham, who documented this in his 1983 book Trading with the Enemy, the US government deliberately buried the evidence. They feared — and this is their own reasoning — that prosecuting these powerful financiers would cause “public scandal,” undermine morale, and make it impossible for corporate boards to help the American war effort. In other words: the same men funding Hitler were also needed to run the Allied war machine. Both sides. Same bankers.

Standard Oil — today’s ExxonMobil, owned at the time by John D. Rockefeller and associates — continued selling oil to Nazi Germany through neutral countries even during the war. Without that oil, historians have argued, the German military could not have invaded the Soviet Union. General Motors, Ford, IBM, Chase Bank, and dozens of other American companies maintained business relationships with Nazi Germany throughout the 1930s and into the war years.

The lesson is not that these companies were Nazi sympathisers. Most of them were not. The lesson is simpler and more disturbing: they did not care. They were making money. Ideology was irrelevant. Nationalism was irrelevant. The war was business. Whoever won, they won too.

Smedley Butler, one of the most decorated US Marine generals in history, understood this perfectly. He wrote a short book in 1935 called War Is A Racket. His opening line: “War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious.”

He was describing the same system that Alex Krainer described to Glenn Diesen this week. Nothing has changed. Only the geography.

So what exactly is happening in Iran?

You have been told it is about nuclear weapons. Or women’s rights. Or terrorism. Or freedom and democracy.

Krainer said this plainly in his interview: “All of these are merely pretexts.”

He has been watching financial markets his entire career. He has spent decades studying why wars actually happen. And his answer is this: Iran is the fifth or sixth wealthiest country in the world when it comes to natural resources. The country sits on an estimated $35 trillion worth of oil, gas, minerals, and other assets. That number checks out — Iran holds the world’s fourth largest proven oil reserves and the second largest natural gas reserves on the planet.

Now, here is the key question: who controls those resources?

Right now, the Iranian government does. They sell their oil and gas on their own terms, through their own channels, and the money goes to the Iranian state. Western banks have no access to it.

But what if a friendly government were installed in Tehran — like the Shah was before the 1979 revolution — one that would open Iran’s vaults to Western financial institutions? What if $35 trillion in natural resource wealth suddenly became “collateral” — the word bankers use for something valuable that backs up a loan or debt?

Krainer explained what this means in plain English. The Western financial system — the US dollar, the euro, all the major currencies — has been printing money for decades. Every time you print more money without anything real backing it, the money already in circulation becomes worth less. It is like watering down a drink: the more water you add, the weaker it gets. This has been making ordinary people gradually poorer for a generation.

The fix, from a banker’s perspective, is to find new “real” wealth to back up the system. Natural resources count. Territory counts. Control of trade routes counts. Iran, sitting on $35 trillion in the ground, is the ultimate prize.

“This is why all wars really are bankers’ wars,” Krainer said. “They will sacrifice every nation they occupy — like the United States, Great Britain, France — completely, in order for their system to survive and continue.”

A pattern that repeats every single time

Krainer and Diesen ran through the list. And it is worth reading slowly, because once you see the pattern, you cannot unsee it.

Muammar Gaddafi of Libya was “killing his own people.” NATO bombed Libya in 2011. Today, Libya is a failed state with open slave markets, where human beings are sold in the street. It was the most prosperous country in Africa under Gaddafi. Today it is rubble and warlords.

Saddam Hussein was a “madman” with weapons of mass destruction. The United States invaded Iraq in 2003. The weapons did not exist. Iraq has not functioned as a proper country since.

Bashar al-Assad was “the worst person in the world.” Syria was bombed and destabilised. Today, Syria is governed by a man who, until very recently, had a $10 million US government bounty on his head as a terrorist. He is now welcomed in Western capitals.

The Taliban in Afghanistan were monsters. The United States occupied Afghanistan for twenty years, officially to bring democracy and protect women and girls. More than half of all children born during the US occupation were permanently stunted from malnutrition — their bodies and brains damaged for life because their mothers did not have enough food. When the US left in 2021, it took nothing but the money.

Krainer recalled that the CIA, in documents leaked by WikiLeaks, internally recommended framing the failing Afghanistan occupation as being about women’s rights specifically because European public support was collapsing. Not because the CIA cared about women. Because “women’s rights” tested well in Germany and France.

Now the story is Iran. Nuclear weapons. Women and veils. Clerical dictatorship. You have heard this script before. Many times.

What the closure of the Strait of Hormuz actually means for you

This is where it gets very real, very fast — even for people who have never followed financial news in their lives.

The Strait of Hormuz is a narrow channel of water between Iran and Oman. It is about 33 kilometres wide at its narrowest point. Every single day, in normal times, approximately 20 million barrels of oil pass through that channel. That is one-fifth of all the oil the world uses. It also handles 20% of the world’s liquefied natural gas — the fuel that heats homes and generates electricity across Europe and Asia.

When Iran closed that strait in March 2026, it was like someone turning off one-fifth of the world’s fuel tap overnight.

Here is what happened next, which I have checked across multiple sources. Oil prices shot up sharply. Natural gas prices in Europe rose 77% in the first ten days alone — more steeply than after Russia invaded Ukraine. Qatar, which is the world’s largest exporter of natural gas, had its main processing plant — Ras Laffan — damaged by Iranian strikes. QatarEnergy declared force majeure, which in plain English means: we cannot deliver what we promised because something beyond our control has stopped us. The damage to that facility is expected to take up to five years to repair.

Five years of reduced global gas supply. Starting now.

The International Energy Agency called this “the greatest global energy security challenge in history.” The European Central Bank postponed interest rate cuts and warned that major economies including Germany and Italy face the risk of technical recession — meaning their economies actually shrink — if disruptions continue through the summer.

A global think tank called Capital Economics modelled what happens if oil prices reach $150 per barrel for six months. The answer: food prices rise. Inflation rises. Economic growth falls. Unemployment rises. And in poor countries that import food and fuel — countries across Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Latin America — the outcome is famine. Krainer put it plainly: “This misadventure might cost millions, maybe tens or hundreds of millions of lives in the global south.”

He is not exaggerating. Natural gas is the raw material for the fertiliser that grows most of the world’s food. Disrupting gas supply disrupts fertiliser supply. Disrupting fertiliser supply means less food grown. Less food grown means higher food prices. Higher food prices, in countries already at the edge, means people starve. This is not a metaphor or a worst-case scenario. It is basic agricultural economics.

Europe: the most exposed, and nobody is telling them honestly

Krainer was most detailed about Europe, and most of what he said checks out.

Europe cut off its Russian gas supplies after the Ukraine war began. The Nord Stream pipelines — which ran directly from Russia to Germany — were destroyed in 2022 (an act of sabotage that has never been officially solved, though investigative journalists including Seymour Hersh attributed it to the United States). A quarter of Nord Stream 2 is still intact and could still deliver gas. Europe refuses to use it.

Instead, Europe became dependent on Qatar and the United States for its gas. Qatar is now offline. American gas is more expensive and increasingly political. And Europe entered this crisis with gas storage at only 30% capacity — the lowest it has been in years — after a harsh winter.

The result: European chemical and steel manufacturers have already imposed surcharges of up to 30% on their products to cover energy costs. That means everything made from steel and chemicals costs more. That means prices rise across the economy. That means the money in ordinary people’s pockets buys less. That is inflation. Combined with economic slowdown, that is stagflation — the worst economic condition, where you get both the pain of rising prices and the pain of stagnant or falling wages at the same time.

Krainer also mentioned something more alarming. He said European nations are “explosively configured for a breakout of civil wars.” He cited political economist David Betts, who I checked — Betts does indeed argue that economic pressure on European households has reached a point where social stability is genuinely at risk. Around 35% of European households already struggle to make ends meet. In some countries, it is two-thirds.

What happens when governments cannot provide basic economic security? Historically, they look for an external enemy to redirect anger. Krainer believes European governments will increasingly point toward Russia — and that this could push the continent toward a war with Russia that it is not prepared for and cannot win.

Saudi Arabia: the warning Kissinger gave, coming true

American diplomat Henry Kissinger famously said: “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.”

Krainer applied this to Saudi Arabia. Riyadh backed the US-Israel attack on Iran. It lobbied Trump to bomb Iran. And yet Krainer looked at what is being built around Saudi Arabia — Israeli and UAE military footholds in Somalia and southern Yemen, effectively surrounding the kingdom — and noted that IDF soldiers in some units wear patches depicting “Greater Israel,” a map that includes a significant portion of what is today Saudi Arabia.

“Once Iran is out of the way,” Krainer said, “the next easy picking, low-hanging fruit would be Saudi Arabia.”

His explanation for why Saudi Arabia sided against Iran anyway: Riyadh has more than one trillion dollars sitting in accounts at the United States Federal Reserve. They watched what happened to Russia’s overseas assets — frozen, seized — after the Ukraine war. They calculated that if they chose the wrong side, they would never see their money again. Short-term financial fear overrode long-term survival logic.

“I think the ultimate result is that a lot of these Gulf kingdoms will disappear,” Krainer said.

The bigger game: Iran is just one piece

Diesen raised something that Krainer then confirmed. The infrastructure being bombed in Iran is not random. The railways, the ports, the energy corridors being destroyed — these are the routes connecting Iran to Russia in the north, to India and China in the east. They are the arteries of the Eurasian integration project that China, Russia, Iran, and India have been building for a decade as an alternative to the Western-dominated trading system.

Krainer was direct: “If they managed to overthrow Vladimir Putin’s government in Russia, they would use Russia against China in exactly the same way they used Ukraine against Russia.”

The playbook is always the same. Take over a country. Use that country’s military and economic power to attack the next target. Divide. Weaken. Control. Repeat.

Krainer traced this back to what strategists call Mackinderian geopolitics — the British imperial doctrine, over a century old, which holds that whoever prevents any single Eurasian power from becoming too strong maintains global dominance. Keep everyone fighting each other. Keep everyone weak. Keep everyone dependent on Western banks and Western corporations.

“This British geopolitics, where you’re constantly fomenting wars to keep everybody weak and divided and make sure that they are the clients of Western banks and Western corporations,” Krainer said, “that has to end — because it’s just creating millions and millions of casualties of war, destroyed economies, suffocated growth.”

The ceasefire changes nothing fundamental

Here is the thing about the ceasefire that was announced on 7 April. Markets celebrated. Oil dropped. Stock prices rose.

Krainer’s assessment: “I would read exactly zero into that.”

And the evidence backs him up. Qatar’s gas plant will not be repaired for up to five years. European gas storage is still critically low going into the summer refill season. The fertiliser shock will feed through to food prices across the Global South over the next twelve to eighteen months. The infrastructure in Iran that has been bombed — the railways, the ports, the energy corridors — does not rebuild itself the day a ceasefire is announced. And within hours of the ceasefire, Israel had already bombed Lebanon, killing 254 people and wounding more than 1,160.

The bankers, as always, are positioned on both sides of this. They collected on the way up — weapons contracts, oil price premiums, war insurance. They will collect on the way down — reconstruction contracts, new debt instruments for damaged nations, access to whatever Iran can be pressured to offer in the negotiations. And if the ceasefire collapses and the war restarts, they collect again.

Prescott Bush made money from both the Nazi war machine and the Allied war effort in the 1940s. Nothing about that logic has changed in eighty years.

The bottom line, in the plainest possible language

The Iran war is not about nuclear weapons. It is not about women’s rights. It is not about terrorism or democracy or the Strait of Hormuz.

It is about who owns $35 trillion sitting in the ground under Iranian soil.

It is about whether global trade routes through the Gulf remain under independent regional control, or become chokepoints managed by the US-Israeli-Gulf alliance.

It is about whether the Eurasian integration project — China, Russia, Iran, India building an alternative to the Western-dominated financial system — gets destroyed before it can fully take shape.

And underneath all of it, as always, are the same banking institutions that funded Hitler through the Union Banking Corporation, that sold oil to the Nazis through Standard Oil, that armed both sides of every major conflict in living memory and profited handsomely from every one of them.

Smedley Butler saw it in 1935. Alex Krainer is saying it in 2026. The script has not changed.

The only question is whether enough people are listening this time.

Based on the interview between Alex Krainer and Glenn Diesen, Global Economy Will Be Transformed After the Iran War. Additional sources: Wikipedia — Economic Impact of the 2026 Iran War; IEA — greatest global energy security challenge in history; Bruegel Institute analysis; European Central Bank statements, March 2026; Goldman Sachs energy impact model; Capital Economics scenario analysis; Al Jazeera energy economics coverage; Euronews, April 9, 2026; Qatar Energy force majeure declaration; The Guardian — Prescott Bush Nazi connections, September 2004; Washington Times — Union Banking Corporation declassified documents, 2003; Spartacus Educational — Brown Brothers Harriman and Nazi financing; Smedley Butler — War Is A Racket, 1935; Charles Higham — Trading with the Enemy, 1983.