Susan Kokinda argues that President Trump has “put the empire on notice” by exposing what she calls a decades-long British-run extortion system centered on the Strait of Hormuz.
She says Trump moved to break the alleged protection racket by undermining Lloyd’s of London’s role in maritime insurance, pushing the U.S. to provide coverage, and enforcing an “all or none” approach to Iran’s oil sales.
Kokinda highlights UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer declining to join an American blockade and claims Britain has lost control of the choke point.
She details financial actions targeting Iranian money flows, including UAE arrests of IRGC-linked money changers, Treasury Secretary Bessent using Patriot Act Section 311 against a Zurich bank, and scrutiny of London-based crypto exchanges and Santander UK.
She cites a UK military chief admitting Britain’s war planning has lapsed since the Cold War and links fuel disruptions and protests to the conflict, concluding Trump has forced a hidden imperial system into the open.
Chapters
00:00 The Monday Brief - Intro - April 13, 2026
02:12 Lloyd's of London Blinks: How Trump Seized the Empire's Chokepoint
05:05 Bessent's Nuclear Option: From Dubai to Zurich to the City of London
07:10 Britain's Top General Confesses: "We Have No War Plan"
Snapshots and Notes
Yesterday, President Trump put the empire on notice with this post…
That’s not a threat - that’s an exposure.
That’s a man who was named a hidden game, a game fought in the shadows for decades.
And here’s what this president sounds like when he knows he has won this round…
“Make a deal or not makes no difference to me.
“And the reason is because we’ve won.
“But from my standpoint, I don’t care.”
And here’s what he’s demanding…
“They haven’t left the bargaining table.
“I predict they come back and they give us everything we want.
“And I told my people I want everything.
“I don’t want 90%.
“I don’t want 95%.
“I told them I want everything.
“They have no cards.”
That is the verdict of a president who hasn’t just changed the outcome,
he’s changed the board itself.
Now, right now on social media, there are people, including some who voted for Trump, who are calling for the 25th Amendment, saying he’s lost it, he’s reckless, he started a war nobody wanted, and now he’s telling us he doesn’t care whether we win or lose.
Well, here’s what they’re missing…
Iran is not the target, Iran is a node, a piece on the board the British Empire has managed for over a century.
And the president’s real target is
the infrastructure of imperial control itself
the financial choke points
the energy dependencies
the offshore banking apparatus
He’s naming it, and he’s forcing a hidden war into the daylight where it can finally be fought and won.
Susan Kokinda has researched and watched the empire operate in the shadows for over a century, now it’s out in the open.
She is going to cover three things in this episode…
Lloyd’s of London Blinks: How Trump Seized the Empire’s Chokepoint [02:12]
So, for over a century, the Strait of Hormuz has been the Empire’s ultimate leverage point: whoever controls it, controls who prospers, and who doesn’t.
Britain managed that choke point through Iran, through successive regime changes that go back to Mossadegh.
But it was different regimes and the same imperial function…
Keep the region unstable
Keep the choke point contested
Keep the world dependent
That’s the protection racket in its purest form.
The mob breaks your windows, keeping the region unstable, keeps the ships from moving, and then charges you for the protection that makes passage possible.
Lloyd’s of London was the insurance arm of the racket.
You want your ship to transit the Strait, then buy our coverage.
And the City of London collected a cut on every ship.
Iran breaking windows was good for business because up until now, Lloyds just raised the premiums.
Then Donald Trump moved to shut down the racket and Lloyds canceled all the insurance.
The president told his treasury secretary, move in and have the U.S. provide insurance;
h
e broke their financial arm first.
Now he’s finishing the job militarily, he’s ending world extortion.
On Fox yesterday, here’s what the president said…
“We’re not going to let Iran make money on selling oil to people that they like and not people that they don’t like or whatever it is.
“It’s going to be all or none, and that’s the way it is.
“And it’ll be, you saw what we did with Venezuela.
“It’ll be something very similar to that, but at a higher level.”
All or none - no imperial management, no picking winners and losers.
The choke point is American now, not just because America seized it, but because America named what it actually was and is refusing to play the game any longer.
And this morning, we got the clearest possible confirmation of what has actually changed.
Keir Starmer, the prime minister of the country that managed this choke point for a century, was asked whether Britain would join the American blockade, and he said, “No.”
link / archive not available w/o paywall
Now, the president has described Starmer’s position throughout this Iran conflict very clearly, characterizing it more than once as a, quote, Neville Chamberlain statement.
So the mob’s enforcer has been neutralized.
Now, admittedly, Keir Starmer is a pretty pathetic excuse for a don, but his bluff has been called.
The choke point the British Empire managed for a century is now an American operation.
Britain didn’t lose access to the strait, Britain lost the game.
Bessent’s Nuclear Option: From Dubai to Zurich to the City of London [05:05]
Now, that’s the physical side of the protection racket - here’s the rest of it.
The U.S. is targeting the money flows to the guys who break the windows.
Let’s start with Dubai.
The Conservative Treehouse flagged the story today in a post entitled, Cut Off the Money - The U.S. military will start enforcing embargo…
They report that the blockade is happening against the little-discussed backdrop of Dubai targeting Iranian money changers.
Dubai was the washing machine where oil proceeds went in and clean dollars came out.
UAE authorities arrested dozens of IRGC-linked money changers, shut down their companies, and closed their offices.
The Gulf states just shut the machine off, but that’s not all…
Two days before Operation Epic Fury launched, U.S. Treasury Secretary Bessent deployed Section 311 of the Patriot Act against MBAER Merchant Bank in Zurich, which has laundered over $100 million of IRGC money.
MBAER is now being liquidated, and Secretary Bessent’s statement wasn’t just addressed to Iran…
Now, Section 311 is the nuclear option of financial warfare.
Bessent used it two days before the war began - that is not a coincidence
And here are a few other publicly named institutions that could be next, and they’re headquartered in London.
Two London registered crypto exchanges processed roughly $1 billion for the IRGC since 2023.
And Santander UK ran Iranian petrochemical front companies right near Buckingham Palace.
So the City of London’s books are open, and Bessent has shown he knows how to read them.
Britain’s Top General Confesses: “We Have No War Plan” [07:10]
Iran’s money is being cut off from the Gulf to London to Zurich.
Its neighbors have now chosen sides, and the choke point is named and claimed.
So what does Britain have left?
This week, Britain’s own military chief told us, Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton admitted that the United Kingdom is updating its government war book a strategic blueprint which has not been actively maintained since the Cold War,
that is, for 30 years.
Institutional knowledge has been lost, muscle memory diminished, and several years of calm has created a situation where very few in the UK would know how to respond to a war footing.
30 years, no functioning war plan.
Why didn’t that matter until now?
Because Britain had the United States.
For the three decades, the empire ran its geopolitical agenda on American muscle.
Washington provided the troops and the carrier groups.
London provided the financial plumbing and the narrative management.
The City of London didn’t need a war plan,
and it required only one thing, an America that never asks questions.
Now, that arrangement had a brand name, NATO.
Britain has been the key architect of NATO’s political direction since its founding. shaping its missions and its mandate, and pointing American power where the empire needed it, like Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan.
Every one of those wars had British intelligence fingerprints on the trigger.
NATO was the mechanism, and American taxpayers and American soldiers were the instrument.
Trump has now called all of that into question, and the British establishment hasn’t recovered from the shock.
Because without American muscle, NATO is a bureaucracy with a flag.
And without NATO, Britain has no war plan.
So, Sir, Knighton’s admission isn’t a military embarrassment - it’s a civilizational confession.
But the empires lost something else.
For 20 years, the ideology holding much of this together was the green transition.
That energy dependency didn’t matter because renewables were coming.
And then the Iran War blew that apart.
When the Strait closed, the green narrative couldn’t keep the lights on or the filling stations supplied.
Reality asserted itself, and the people who live closest to physical reality felt it first.
Irish farmers and truck drivers have been out in the streets, in force.
600 of Ireland’s 1,500 filling stations out of fuel, and the Irish Defense Forces deployed against their own farmers.
Although there are reports that a lot of the police and the military are calling in sick.
Now, these aren’t radicals.
These are the people who live in physical reality, who need fuel to farm, to haul, and to heat.
And they’re calling the question.
Meanwhile, Keir Starmer told the British public he is fed up with energy bills being affected by decisions involving Trump and Putin.
Really?
The prime minister of the country that …
built the choke point system
ran the offshore banking apparatus funding the IRGC and
imposed a green regime on his own country
… is blaming Trump and Putin?
That’s not a political statement - that’s a confession of defeat.
So while the press is asking whether Vice President Vance got a deal in Islamabad, it’s the wrong question.
President Trump answered the right one before the talk started, when he said he didn’t care about the outcome because he’d already won the game that mattered.
He dragged the extortion racket into the open.
The empire ran the world through choke points that were never named, financial pipelines that were never traced, and a military arrangement that was never questioned.
Concealment was their operating system.
To understand the full depth of this fight, the imperial architecture that the president is dismantling, and what it means for America’s future, you need to be reading Promethean Action as well as Decisive Liberty News
Because the empire is running out of cards, and it’s time to end their game.
Promethean Action has been shining the light on that system all along and building the forces that can now back up the president in ending the empire’s extortion racket.
Go to the Promethean Action website and sign up…
