As the old war saying goes, amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics. This post will talk about the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (spoiler alert: it's running out) and the next will talk about the National Defense Reserve Fleet (spoiler alert: it's running aground). But first, some necessary context.

1. We have been in World War III since at least 2001. Multiple invasions? Mass genocides? This has it all. 5 million mostly Muslims were dead before Gaza and the Whites invaded multiple countries before Iran. It's been war across the world since the Pearl Harbored themselves, what else do you want to call it, unless you're being racist about it? This is important because it allows us to connect the two fronts in West Asia and actually understand what's going on.
   
   For further context, World War I and II were fights among the 'first' world for world domination, World War Too (the Cold War) was an ongoing struggle against the USSR (the second world), and World War III is the final battle (inshallah) to recolonize the third world completely. This is where we are now.
2. America is not fighting this war alone, it's is one White Empire. I won't bother saying America and Europe for Ukraine and America and Israel for Iran/Palestine because it's all one thing. And I won't bother differentiating between the actions of non-entities like Saudi Arabia and Japan either. I have personally been colonized by the Portugeuse, Dutch, British, and now America via the IMF. To us on the bottom, what's the difference?

Sorry for the long intro, but this unwhiting of history is important to understand the present. What we have today is not one 'conflict' in Palestine and another with Russia and another with China. No, we have a White Empire still trying to take over the world and take (or at least break) Asia once and for all. If we know their strategy (take over the world) and we understand their tactics (genocidal violence), then we can move onto what's more important. Logistics. Starting with oil.

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR)

When they took over the White Empire, the US military became the single largest consumer of oil, and they got a lot from the tangential spoils of World War II in West Asia. However, when they lost direct control of this with the 1970s oil embargoes and the Islamic Revolution in Iran, that put the fear of God in the Great Satan. Never again, they vowed, which finally gets us out of history into the present. That is why the Strategic Petroleum Reserve was created.

As their Government Accountability Office stated (in May 2026), "The purpose of the SPR is to provide energy security through emergency stocks of crude oil. In the aftermath of damaging international embargoes in the 1970s—a time when the United States was heavily dependent on crude oil imports—Congress authorized DOE to create a reserve in 1975 with the aim of reducing the impact of severe disruptions in the supply of petroleum products." Sound familiar? Did you even read the quote?

The SPR is, well, I'll let them explain, "60 active storage caverns that were solution-mined out of naturally occurring underground salt domes at four storage sites located in coastal Texas and Louisiana. These caverns are located thousands of feet underground and accessed from the surface through one to three injection and withdrawal wells per cavern. Crude oil is released from the SPR by pumping in raw water (e.g., fresh water from nearby rivers or lakes) to the bottom of a cavern—this displaces the crude oil, which is pumped out through the well and then through pipelines."

These caverns have been filled with millions of barrels (worth) of oil, to protect the Empire from the consequences of its own bad behavior. And when they finally tried to take (or break) the only fully independent nation in West Asia it worked. So far.

At the start of World War III, the Empire was stacking oil, as they became net exporters and stole from Iraq, Syria, and Libya. This was (for the bad guys) the good part of World War III. The spoils before the ruin, the rise before the fall. Since the tide started turning in Russia and Iran, however, they have been forced to make withdrawals. Let's zoom in and scrunch up a bit to look:

First, the Burger Reich overthrew Ukraine in 2014 and threw them at Russia for decades before Russia 'invaded' in 2022. This took a lot of oil (especially diesel) offline, especially when the Empire blew up the Nordstream pipeline in occupied Germany. To relieve this pressure, on March 1, 2022 the Energy Secretary said,

Today, I chaired an emergency ministerial meeting of the International Energy Agency where the United States and 30 other member countries agreed to collectively release an initial 60 million barrels of oil from strategic petroleum reserves. This decision reflects our common commitment to address significant market and supply disruptions related to President Putin’s war on Ukraine.

You can see how the White Empire operates here. It hides behind acronyms like the IAE or NATO, in many names as well as none. These 'member' countries are, of course, just empty vassals making a lot of noise (it's all one White Empire) and 'Putin's' war in Ukraine was actually their latest affront (it's World War III). The drawdown from the SPR 'after' Ukraine ended up being much more than 30 million (the US's share). As their 2026 GAO report says, it was "180.0 million barrels—the largest single sustained release event to date." Or as Homer Simpson would say, the largest single release event so far.

Iran

The other unfinished business of last century – besides sowing civil war in the USSR – was taking down the only fully free nation in West Asia, Iran. Despite the Empire's strategic reserves being lower than almost any point before, they decided to open two fronts at once.

When the Empire attacked Iran in 2026, Iran cut off the Strait of Hormuz, immediately throttling global supply. And when then Empire attacked Yemen, that cut off the Red Sea also, creating a Suez Crisis in aggregate. On top of this, the United States Navy blockaded the blockade, when it wasn't getting defeated by 'toilets', 'laundry', and suicidal mutinies. At this point you have to conclude that the Empire wants these supply disruptions (for reasons we'll discuss). As one must always repeat in the face of an empire that has no name and 'conflicts' that are obfuscated by many names, POSIWID! The point of a system is what it does.

POSIWID

The media analysis of events still operates from the position that America is a real country and that its political leaders are just not completely, comically corrupt. But once you abandon those pretences, what's actually happening makes complete sense. America is controlled by narrow business interest and they are making wild profits from oil, weapons, and the volatility itself. People keep asking why America is doing such dumb stuff, but follow the money. The system is operating exactly as intended (at founding, only propertied men could vote). It's just not intended to to help Americans, even less the world. POSIWID.

Cornering the oil trade has been very good for the American oil business, whatever it does to the rest of the real economy. The American economy is just a multi-level marketing scheme for graphics cards at this point. It's all fraud. All the higher prices their media reports about so mournfully are actually higher profits for the elites that own the same media outlets.

The FT talks about the rising diesel crack being bad, but it's not bad for many FT readers, who are crack dealers. Keep this in mind as you read,

The pump price of diesel — the lifeblood of the economy because of its essential role in powering industry and agriculture — hit $5.47 a gallon on Tuesday, approaching its all-time high of $5.82 as wars in the Middle East and Europe hobble production and throttle global supplies.

Prices have jumped 8 per cent in the past month while the gap between the cost of diesel and crude oil, known as the “crack spread”, has hit a record high in recent days in a sign of the deepening supply shock.

The FT acts like these wars in the Middle East and Europe just happened, when they were wars of choice. And they act like they're separate wars, when it's one White Empire on a warpath. America is literally just a gas station with nukes, as that war criminal John McCain accufessed once, and they're holding up the competition. What the FT describes here as stuff that just happened is really cause and effect. White Empire attacked in order to drive up their own profits. POSIWID. That 8% increase for plebs at the pump is someone else's profit, plus they can gamble on tweets using insider information. Everything's going swimmingly, if you're a shark.

The credulous newshounds act like this is bad, but c'mon, FT readers paying $75 a month can read between the lines. One man's penury is another man's profit, this is the entire capitalist model. Capitalism is not having markets (communism has markets, the ancients had markets). Capitalism is coercing everything into a market. Like communism, it's a direction, not a destination. In this case, the Empire forced Europeans into its natural gas markets, forced Venezuela into its markets, and is running its refineries full tilt to profit from the closure of Hormuz. Outlets like the FT give you this news without naming the actors, because they're part of the same manufactured drama. Like actual crack, the US government is not mad about the crack spread. They're the ones selling it!

Wait but why

You might be like, 'but why would a country do this, it's suicidal' and this is again missing a vital point. America is not a country, it's White Empire, and the White Empire is not run by people but corporations. From the Dutch East India Company to the East India Company to this present company of rogues, it's nothing personal, it's strictly business. I call the actual rulers of White Empire Corporate AI because it's accurate. Corporations are algorithmically driven to only increase profits and they are completely agnostic to political concerns except as marketing slogans. And they'll crash the whole system before they have a bad quarter, they're quite happy hard restarting. You have to think not like a state, which is outdated, but like a corporate. A corporate raider, to be exact.

So what is the actual business model of White Empire? Look to private equity (white word for oligarchy). When PE raider take over a company, they do not care about the actual needs of the company, its employees, and certainly not society. They care about money. So they drive up debts in the company's name, fire the people that actually make things, sell off assets, and profit as much as possible in the short term before leaving the company for dead and moving onto the next one. This is how White Empire operates. Ask Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, and now America. It's the same game with different shells.

Like a private equity company taking over a company to burn its assets, the corporate interests that have (completely) taken over the US Government are using the military to scare up profits and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve as an asset to just sell of for quick profits. Like any PE bust-out (leveraged buy-out) this will spin out a lot of money for them and kill the host eventually, but the who cares? Corporate AI is not human. What's happening isn't the suicide of America. It's its murder.

The Race To Empty The SPR

The White Empire is trying to keep the con going so it can loot and Iran is trying to expose it so they can live. And the White Empire has a significant shield built up in the SPR. They can avoid the consequences of the 1970s-style oil shock (despite a bigger physical shock) as long as they maintain the reserve to avoid those very consequences. But they can't avoid them forever if Iran drives those reserves down. This is the tussle going on in front of us. And you can literally see the Empire cracking under the pressure.

Remember that the United States stores crude oil in its SPR, not finished products like diesel. Just as it releases US dollars to primary dealers to make usurious profits, it is releasing US oil to private refiners to make crack. The profit margin on finished products.

The profit on three barrels of oil is an important measure here, called the 3-2-1 Crack Spread. For every three barrels of crude you get two barrels of gasoline (RB1) and one barrel of diesel (HO1). To get the spread you divide that all by the price of a barrel (USOIL) x3, creating a measure called the 3-2-1 spread.

Note that I'm not graphing the spread here as one number, but showing you as a literal spread, between the revenue from one barrel of refined products (red) compared to the cost of one barrel of government crude (black). The crack is the gap is double now, whch is unheard of. At a time you'd think they'd be encouraging saving oil, the US government is encouraging refining it like there's no tomorrow. Which is a self-fulfilling prophecy, no?

The US government is subsidizing the rich (refiners) and the rich are taxing the poor (schmucks). Like with COVID, like with Ukraine, like with tariffs, White oligarchs are using every crisis to just increase prices, and eating any government subsidies up. This is not an oopsy, it's not some strange phenomenon. Remember, always, that POSIWID. The system is working exactly as (the founders) intended. The rich get rich and the poor get poorer.

Remember that at founding only (White male) property owners could vote and that's still the governing principle of America. Their only interest is interest on principle. For a while this was balanced by some interest in not killing the golden goose but now they've put it in the oven with full gas on.

Let's look at diesel, for the sake of one more graph. The diesel crack spread is a completely artificial measure, you don't get a barrel of diesel from a barrel of oil, but it's still useful for understanding how cracked out everything is. This spread is wider than ever and it forms a gigantic fault line between the real economy (agriculture, mining, everything important) and the financialized economy (lines, graphs, and everything on them). And believe you me, there's an earthquake coming.

Having such a high 'crack' is actually a huge incentive to refine as much crude as possible and rapidly empty the reserves. While places like Sri Lanka and China are doing what rational people would do, reducing usage in the face of dwindling supply, the Americans are actually increasing usage because they're high on their own supply. Selling government oil at subsidized rates to your mates only encourages them to refine more, because the profits are so great. And this is not for American use! This has nothing to do with the American people, itself a cursed category of suckers and losers. It is just about the money, and making as much of it as possible.

As the FT writes, "US refineries have been running at full tilt in an attempt to fill the gap, shipping record volumes of fuel to global markets, which analysts said would be difficult to sustain because of falling inventories." The FT again positions this as 'oops a bunch of stuff is happening' but the US military is at every crime scene, making this stuff happen. No, none of this is coincidental, this is what the mafia calls a bust-out. Or as the private equity mafia calls it, a leveraged buyout.

An LBO is when you take over an establishment and strip its assets to make a quick buck, with the emphasis on quick. This is an LBO of the US government (elections only cost a few bill), and they're selling off the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and everything that's not bolted down. And they're doing it as quickly as possible. Make hay while the sun shines, and burn oil while the world burns.

The Weird China Thing

Let me briefly interlude into China, because they're doing something unusual. If China was trying to destroy America like America says, they could have just kept going as usual. If China imported, refined, and used its normal quantity of oil, America would be at tank bottom already. But they didn't. China has somehow reduced imports by nearly 50% without feeling much stress. I was just in China and they're chilling. It's not like Sri Lanka where we have fuel rationing, this doesn't seem to be effecting them. Something weird is happening.

At one level, China is doing what you'd expect during a supply shortage and using less. They are also dipping into their national reserves for national reasons, as such things are for. And China has a lot of (opaque) reserves, they stored Russian and Iranian oil when it was cheap and can make 300 million barrels of 'oil' a year (as they did in 2024) from coal. The imperialist sources differ on how much they're drawing their reserves, but they agree that it's about 1.2 billion barrels worth. I think it's more, but who knows.

China has at least 3-4x the reserves of America, is rapidly transitioning to renewables for many purposes, and they're not looting the nation to benefit one class of parasitic speculators. They have central planners who seem to have planned wisely and put, to use a crude phrase, China first. It's like the grasshopper and the ant story (where the ant saves and the grasshopper squanders). In a way, China is incidentally saving America, but maybe everything's not about America.

China may also be doing what a superpower should be doing, which is using its power to stabilize the world. This helps America, but only so much as America is another place in the world (a position it needs to get used to).

Again, none of America's enemies actually want to fight, and they want even less to destroy its empire outright. We all live in the White Empire in some way, even if it's not right. Everybody keeps trying to give America a way out of its madness (even if it's madness to expect this) and to control the demolition of its empire as much as possible. Which may be what China's doing here.

Communist China is a Confucian government in this sense. Ruling by wu-wei, ie ruling by not ruling. They take a ritual position facing [global] south and hope that people follow their example. Even morons like Americans, as little as that is possible. As the commentaries on Confucius say, "it is far more likely that ruling by wu-wei refers to ruling by means of Virtue: the ruler morally perfects himself and thereby effortlessly transforms everyone around him."

Iran As Historical Actor

Iran, however, is not in China's position. They are in Iran, getting bombed and blockaded and need to, as quickly as possible, move things along. Iranian Parliament speaker (and last tweeter standing) MB Ghalibaf recently said, "They wanted to punish Iran. Punished themselves with triple-digit oil instead. 10/10 strategy." This is more a statement of intent than the state that we're in, unfortunately. Oil is not triple digits (though it's pushing it), Iran is being punished (though they're united and resilient), and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is still working as intended. A 1970s style oil shock is still being prevented by 1970s decisions, so far. However, a 1980s style crack binge is leading to a 1991 style collapse, inshallah.

Iran keeps pointing to the real economy and America keeps pointing out how high they are in the stock market, but reality will have the last world (they may scheme, but God is the best of planners, as the Quran says). Hormuz isn't just a closure of oil, it's a block of fertilizer, of raw materials, of the very feedstock of modern society. To explain this, Ghalibaf posted an equation in April,

ΔO_BSOH > 0 ⇒ f(f(O)) > f(O)

You can write this in English as "If a Hormuz blockade pushes oil prices up, then the cascading after-effects will be even more severe than the initial shock." This ain't wrong, it's just taking a little long.

The oil price after the blockade (O_BSOH) has gone up more than nothing (0), that's known. And therefore (⇒) the second order effects (f(f(O)) have already been more damaging (>) than just the first order effects f(O). The Empire has been able to suppress f(O) as in the crude price of oil, but not (f(f(O)) like diesel. And they have been able to suppress consequences in the imperial core, but not at the edges anymore. The yen-carry trade in energy-starved Japan is breaking down and the energy-starved AI bubble in occupied Korea has already popped. And these are load-bearing lackeys, the whole imperial financial system is shutting down, and (as Iran knows) that's all they really care about.

One of the biggest (but still fake) metrics that will cause the Empire problems is bond rates. They are going up all around the core (France, Japan, Germany) and US rates are rising also. This doesn't mean anything (they can just make up more money) until it does (inflation). This is a psychological thing more than anything, all the courtiers are still pretending the emperor has clothes because they're also swimming naked. Nobody wants to be the first to cry out 'the emperor has no clothes!' but nobody wants to be last either. It's a delicate game. And the stakes are slowly rising.

Just ask Hemingway how bankruptcy goes. He said slowly, then all at once. The debt payments this year already are $1 trillion dollars, the US military budget is $1.5 trillion, and there's an obvious madman in charge. US bond rates (basically how rich people feel about a country) are already going up, and every effort from the US Treasury to force them down doesn't work.

When Soros failson Scott Bessent tried to goose the Japanese yen by dumping Euros, that intervention lasted maybe a day and could not contain the contagion. And when he tried to suppress bond yields by announcing buybacks, that only lasted a few hours. He still has a few tricks left in his bag, but they have limited power. America has already issued half of its debt in the last decade, now it's just getting absurd.

Bond markets are one of those second or third order effects that Ghalibaf was talking about. The effects of these effects will be higher interest rates, mortgage rates, and quite likely a Greatest Depression (long time coming). The trillion dollar question is when, but zero points for saying never.

The funny thing is that both Iran, Russia, China, America's declared enemies, are trying to avoid this situation. They're trying to give the Empire a way out. And it's honestly easier than what they're doing now. All America has to do to resolve the Hormuz situation is go home. All they have to do to resolve the Ukraine situation is go home. All they have do to resolve the trade war is trade normally. But no, they're rather blow up their home front than abandon a bit of imperializing abroad. This is how empires die I guess. The way they came in, just less successfully.

I know this was long, but I've already written a Part 2, the Strategic Boat Reserve. That article will be called The Logistics War Part 2: The National Defense Reserve Fleet and it'll be out soon.