In this Saturday Wrap, Barbara Boyd argues that President Trump’s cabinet remarks and comments at the Saudi Investment Forum mark a “verdict” on NATO and the broader transatlantic system that has dominated the global economy for 40 years.
She contends the Iran War is fundamentally a financial story: after Europe offered only a post-hostilities role policing the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. moved to replace Lloyd’s of London by using the U.S. Development Finance Corporation, maritime reinsurance, and Central Command to secure Gulf shipping.
Boyd says this shift amounts to U.S. control over a critical energy chokepoint - captured in Trump’s “Strait of Trump” line - reshaping how oil flows to Asia.
She previews Trump’s May 14–15 Beijing trip, framing U.S.-China relations around shared industrial traditions linked to Sun Yat-sen and rejecting a “cold war” narrative.
Chapters
00:00 The Saturday Wrap-Up - Intro
01:44 The G7 — A Funeral for the Old Order
05:36 The New World — America Takes Control of Energy
09:19 The China Horizon — Sun Yat-sen and the American System
Snapshots and Notes
At Thursday’s cabinet meeting (26-Mar), President Trump issued a warning to NATO and to the entire transatlantic order.
Listen carefully…
“That’s why I’m so disappointed in NATO, because this was a test for NATO.
“This was a test.
“You can help us.
“You don’t have to.
“But if you don’t do that, we’re going to remember.
“Just remember.
“Remember this in a number of months from now.
“Remember my statements.
“They have an expression, a great expression.
“Never forget.
“Never forget.”
Never forget - that is not a complaint, that is a verdict and not just on NATO, that is a verdict on the entire system that has run the global economy for the last 40 years.
The media says the Iran war has alienated Trump’s coalition, trashed his economic agenda, and handed our enemies a gift.
And as they have always been about Trump,
They’re wrong.
The Iran war is not mainly a Middle East story; it is a financial story.
The systematic, deliberate decapitation of the British imperial financial system - and it happened this week.
Barbara Boyd has tracked the imperial great game for decades, and she will show you exactly how it’s being dismantled.
And here’s what she is covering...
The G7 — A Funeral for the Old Order (01:44)
Let’s be clear about what the war in Iran actually is before we talk about the G7…
For two decades, Washington tried every combination of sanctions and diplomacy to stop the Islamic Republic’s nuclear advance.
Iran moved from zero enrichment to 60%, enough for multiple nuclear weapons.
Its missile stockpile grew and spread to proxies from Lebanon to Iraq to Yemen.
They lied about possessing missiles with a 4,000-kilometer range; we know that because they have shot them off in this war.
The old approach failed totally - Trump’s answer was different.
He demanded
a rollback and an end to enrichment
limits on the missile program
the dismantling of the proxy network
Tehran refused.
The result was a shift from bargaining to attrition.
As one Iranian analyst put it this week, negotiation and war are not opposites in this situation.
They are successive phases of the same campaign.
Now, what did Europe do when the United States finally acted?
They said we were violating international law, even though they need natural gas and oil from the Gulf, while the United States does not.
And at the G7 meeting, they finally agreed after much deliberation to help police the Strait of Hormuz …
after hostilities end
after the fighting stops
only when it is safe
Think about what that means…
Europe’s great contribution to the security of the world’s most critical energy choke point is to show up for the cleanup.
On his way to the meeting, Marco Rubio had told them exactly what he and the president thought of this.
He reminded them that the United States has been constantly asked to help in a war, namely, Ukraine.
And when the United States has a need, he said, they didn’t get positive responses.
And then on Friday (27-Mar), at the Saudi Investment Forum in Florida, President Trump delivered the final verdict.
Listen to him...
“But I think a tremendous mistake was when NATO just wasn’t there.
“They just weren’t there.
“It’s going to make a lot of money for the United States because we spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year on NATO, hundreds of dollars protecting them.
“And we would have always been there for them.
“But now, based on their actions, I guess we don’t have to be, do we?
They weren’t there for us, so we no longer have to be there for them.
That is the funeral oration for the transatlantic order.
Not a threat, a verdict.
NATO failed its test.
The city of London’s Praetorian Guard is finished as a strategic partner.
And Trump just said so publicly at a major international forum in front of the world.
He noted that we’ll be saving a lot of money.
The OECD confirmed this in the numbers this week.
The worst economic downgrade of any nation in the G20 went to the United Kingdom, home to the City of London.
Let’s spell that out for you...
The empire that built its global power on controlling the world’s commodity markets is now the weakest economy in the G7.
The funeral is already underway.
But here’s where it gets really interesting, because while Europe was busy writing its post-hostilities commitment, Trump was already building the world that comes next without them.
The New World — America Takes Control of Energy (05:36)
Here is what the media completely missed this week…
While the G7 was negotiating its toothless post-war cleanup role, Scott Bessent was sitting in the cabinet meeting on Thursday (26-Mar), describing what the United States had already done.
Listen carefully...
“We’ve taken actions to ensure oil supplies stranded at sea are made available to the global market.
“Your bold actions like the Development Finance Corporation’s Maritime Reinsurance Program in conjunction with Central Command will soon provide shippers through the Gulf region with a level of security we had never seen before.”
Lloyds of London, the 300-year-old institution at the heart of the City of London’s control of global maritime trade, has been replaced - not threatened, not competed with, replaced.
The United States Development Finance Corporation, working directly with the U.S. military’s Central Command, will become the insurer of record for shipping through the Gulf.
The empire’s financial weapon, control of insurance, control of risk, control of who gets to trade and on what terms, control of prices, has been taken out of London’s hands.
And then Friday (27-Mar), Trump made that official with a single joke at the Saudi Forum that was not a joke at all.
Let’s listen...
“We’re negotiating now, and it’d be great if we could do something, but they have to open it up.
“They have to open up the Strait of Trump, I mean, the Strait of Hormuz.”
The Strait of Trump...
He’s not just taking military control of the most critical energy chokepoint on the planet; he is renaming it.
That is a declaration of sovereign dominion, backed by the U.S. Navy, backed by Gulf Arab allies who have watched Iran attack their ports, their infrastructure, and their tankers for a month and have drawn their own conclusions about who they want running security in their neighborhood.
What does it mean to control the Strait of Hormuz?
It means controlling the flow of roughly 20% of the world’s seaborne oil.
It means that 84% of the crude moving through that Strait, bound for China, India, Japan, and South Korea, moves on American terms, with American insurance and under American security guarantees.
That is not the petrodollar system.
That is something entirely new.
That is the United States becoming the dominant energy guarantor for the entire Asian economy, not through financial manipulation centered in London, but through physical control and trade among sovereign nation-states.
And simultaneously at home, capital is flooding out of Wall Street speculation and into the American physical economy.
Last Monday, Promethean Actions’ Brian Lance documented this in great detail on his Substack.
Energy, mining, manufacturing, nuclear power, defense - all of it is beginning to prosper and flow.
McKinsey, the confidential advisor to the global financial elite, published a report this month, quietly admitting that commodity markets are being, in their words, quote, rebalanced beyond purely market-based logic.
That is McKinsey’s antiseptic way of saying the city of London’s speculative pricing system is finished.
The president sees our economic future in this hemisphere and in direct trade with Russia, China, Japan, and India, not in the dead transatlantic empire.
The state of Trump is not a punchline; it is a policy.
The China Horizon — Sun Yat-sen and the American System (09:19)
Now let’s talk about the emerging story, because this story will find its next chapter in Beijing when the president visits there on May 14th and 15th.
The analysts stuck in the pre-2024 world see this as an economic cold war between two great powers and predict a major clash.
That framing is a British imperial trap designed to keep the two largest physical economies in the world at each other’s throats while the City of London referees.
On Friday (27-Mar), Iran blocked the passage of two Chinese-bound veterans through the Strait of Hormuz…
link (paywall)
Iran is now charging millions in tolls for safe passage, even for China, its largest oil customer.
On Friday (27-Mar), at the Future Investment Forum, Trump was asked which nations were leading the great economic transformation underway worldwide.
Here is what he said...
“But right now, the United States, as the future king of Saudi Arabia said, we’re the hottest country anywhere in the world.
“I must say, I respect China greatly because it’s amazing that with a system that, in theory, shouldn’t work.
“But you look at China, how well they do, how well they manufacture.
“I mean, they manufacture cars so many that they actually have a contest for who can manufacture the least cars because they have so many cars.
“You have to have great respect for China for the job they do, like them or not like them. you have to respect them.”
The United States and China, two industrial and manufacturing superpowers, have something big in common.
There is a figure claimed as a founding hero by both the Chinese Communist Party on the mainland and the Kuomintang in Taiwan.
His name is Sun Yat-sen.
Sun Yat-sen was an American system economist.
His 1922 work, The Industrial Development of China, called explicitly for massive state-assisted industrial investment modeled on the American system,
the tradition of Hamilton, of Lincoln, of Henry Carey.
He studied that tradition.
He embraced it.
And crucially, he rejected the British free-trade model as exactly what it was: a tool of imperial exploitation designed to keep developing nations dependent and underdeveloped.
Sound familiar?
Trump recognizes that both nations can claim a shared tradition going back over a century.
The British imperial system spent 150 years trying to keep America and China from recognizing this common ground.
What you are watching this week, the Strait of Trump, the Bessent Insurance Program, the G7 funeral, is that recognition beginning to dawn.
Donald Trump told the Saudi Investment Forum that America is not bound by old rules, that we invent the future by gathering the best minds and talents and letting them create.
That’s what all the analysts keep missing because they are trapped in the past.
They’re pessimists, and most of them lack the creativity the president is exercising.
They keep analyzing the present as if it were Bush, the Iraq war, and the reign of Dick Cheney and the neocons, or similar constructs.
It’s not that, it’s something entirely new, which rescued our Republic from what we now see in the UK and Europe, the dying and still dangerous outbursts of a failed empire.
The clock is now ticking on the midterms, and the general public, know it or not, has a huge lesson coming at them.
Promethean Action and Decisive Liberty News have a very big job ahead: educating the population away from the Psywar so they can comprehend the wondrous world that may lie ahead.
What looks like chaos to most is actually the deliberate, systematic dismantling of the system that has run the world's economies for the last 40 years.
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