🤵 The Macro Butler’s Monthly Meditation 🤵

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In a development that the Ministry of Regime Change would classify as proceeding according to plan, the Chairman of the Board of Peace appears to have operated under the optimistic assumption that assassinating the Ayatollah would trigger a spontaneous popular uprising — a theory that has, thus far, failed to manifest with the enthusiasm the neocon playbook promised. The security forces remain intact, the IRGC continues to control hard power, missiles, internal security, and economic leverage with characteristic efficiency, and the population — having just witnessed a crackdown that killed 30,000 people weeks ago — is displaying the understandable reluctance of people who remember what happened last time. Meanwhile, Iran's exiled crown prince , a man enormously popular in his own imagination, has urged Iranian security forces to "join the nation" from the comfort of his exile — a rallying cry that is reportedly receiving the reception it deserves.

As in Iraq, the neocons have proclaimed the adversary weak, victory imminent, and the mission already accomplished — while the IRGC consolidates control and the 48-72 hour window for spontaneous liberation quietly closes. This is not a blip — and with Iranian sleeper cells potentially activated across the globe, the Ministry of Peace may have just transformed a regional conflict into a holy war, something considerably more difficult to rebrand as a victory even for ‘The Manipulator in Chief’.

Dear Investors,

Please find below the performance of The Macro Butler IG Portfolio as of end of February 2026.

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/the-macro-butler-ig-portfolio-february-93a

Dear Investors,

Please find below the performance of The Macro Butler Strategic Portfolio as of end of February 2026.

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/the-macro-butler-strategic-portfolio-98b

Dear Investors,

Please find below the performance of The Macro Butler Long/Short Portfolio as of end of February 2026.


https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/the-macro-butler-longshort-portfolio-2fb

In a stirring display of Eurostan solidarity, the Malthusian warmongers of Brussels — ably assisted by the legionaries of Le Petit Napoleon — have seized a Russian shadow fleet tanker in the North Sea, because nothing demonstrates Europe's commitment to energy security quite like intercepting the very oil shipments that keep European industry from going dark. NATO, that tireless guardian of freedom of navigation — except when the navigation involves Russian oil — has enthusiastically endorsed the operation, apparently unconcerned that Europe, which will suffer most from the Persian chokepoint blockade already unfolding in the Middle East, has chosen this precise moment to add North Sea piracy to its energy strategy.

https://x.com/EmmanuelMacron/status/2028035399054942433

Macro-Leon, ever the dutiful student of Donald Copperfield's tariff and seizure playbook, has ensured that bureaucracy and state piracy can indeed be practiced in perfect harmony — simultaneously sanctioning Russian energy, blocking Persian energy, and wondering why the lights are flickering. As the Ministry of Energy Security would remind us: seizing the tanker is not piracy — it is the enforcement of rules-based order. And freezing in the dark is not an energy crisis — it is a principled stand.

When geopolitical chaos spreads faster than a Monday morning flu, BFM 89.9 knows exactly who to call. The Macro Butler returned to the airwaves to deliver his trademark blend of macro wisdom and inconvenient truths — helping investors navigate the investment implications of the new holy war, that entirely predictable consequence of the time-honoured American tradition of bombing for peace. Because when the world is on fire, someone has to tell you where to put your money.

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/interview-with-bfm-899-malaysia-02032026

Donald Copperfield — that great populist champion of the forgotten American and Manipulator In Chief — has proven, in matters of the Deep State, to be no more effective than the long parade of presidential puppets who preceded him, each arriving with a mandate to drain the swamp before discovering that the swamp had already installed spyware on their phones. His MAGA revolution, that stirring call to Make America Great Again, has followed the well-worn path of all such revolutions before it — arriving at its destination with remarkable predictability: another Middle Eastern war, another blank cheque to Tel Aviv, and another president who campaigned on ending forever bankers' wars and promptly started a new one. MAGA, it turns out, is simply MIGA (Make Israel Great Always) with better branding.

In a delightful preview of what "Making America Manufacturing Again" actually looks like in practice, US manufacturing expanded in February — but input prices surged at their fastest pace since 2022, jumping 11.5 points to 70.5 on the ISM prices paid index, the highest since inflation peaked four years ago. The culprit cocktail is familiar: tariffs driving domestic steel and aluminum to their highest prices in the world, supply chain disruptions, and now — entirely coincidentally — a war with Iran which will crumble supply chain even more. Manufacturers, never ones to mince words in anonymous surveys, noted that Section 232 tariffs are "raising prices while lowering demand and profitability" — which is, one might observe, the precise opposite of their stated intention. Others reported receiving "price increase notifications from suppliers based on unsupported tariff claims," expanding staff to manage the chaos, and watching raw material costs climb relentlessly.

In a nutshell, American manufacturing is expanding, input prices are exploding, and Washington just bombed the world's most important oil chokepoint — what could possibly go wrong?

In Eurostan, meanwhile, the green zealots who have spent the last decade assuring the continent that wind turbines and solar panels would render fossil fuels obsolete have achieved a remarkable milestone: European oil inventories are now at their lowest level in five years. The Educated Yet Idiots who govern the region — having enthusiastically dismantled energy infrastructure, rejected nuclear, sanctioned Russian gas, and replaced coherent energy policy with an impressive collection of net-zero targets and subsidy programmes — now find themselves presiding over an energy system that is, by any objective measure, less secure, more expensive, and more vulnerable to geopolitical disruption than when they started.

As the Strait of Hormuz grinds to a halt and crude prices surge, the continent that chose bureaucracy and wind over oil and gas is discovering, with the timing that only history can arrange, that ideology is not a substitute for energy policy.

In a masterpiece of Orwellian logic that the Ministry of Peace would proudly frame and hang above the fireplace, Grand Vizier Rubio explained that the unprovoked attack on an independent sovereign nation was not, in fact, an attack — it was a defensive prevention of a potential retaliation against a prior attack by someone else. To summarise: Israel attacked Iran, Iran was expected to respond, America attacked Iran first to prevent Iran from retaliating against America for an attack America did not conduct, and this pre-emptive defensive aggression was, in the Ministry's own words, going "proactively in a defensive way." As the Ministry of Peace would remind us: this iss not war — it is prevention. Not aggression — it was defence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ee8WIxGCnr0

In a nutshell, bombing a country before it retaliates against someone else's bombs is simply the highest form of peacekeeping. Peace is War. Prevention is Aggression. And the Grand Vizier is, as always, just trying to promote his Malthusian agenda.

In a development that the Ministry of Democratic Values has classified as a legitimate military operation, the Cokehead-in-Chief of Kyiv — that tireless puppet of the American Deep State and Davos Malthusians — has dispatched his drones to Novorossiysk, striking six of seven loading facilities at the Sheskharis oil terminal, several Russian warships, an S-400 radar station, and — entirely incidentally — twenty civilian buildings whose residents are now hospitalised and presumably grateful for the collateral democratisation. The SBU, never one for false modesty, proudly claimed the attack, helpfully explaining that an oil terminal supplying Russian forces is a legitimate military target — a standard of targeting logic that applies exclusively to adversaries of the American imperium and never, under any circumstances, to friendly fire on civilian infrastructure elsewhere.

https://www.reuters.com/world/russia-says-five-injured-massive-overnight-ukrainian-drone-attack-novorossiysk-2026-03-02/

As the Ministry of Peace would remind us: striking civilian neighbourhoods is not terrorism — it is precision democracy delivery. And the Cokehead in Kyiv is not a puppet — he is a sovereign leader, freely chosen, generously funded, and entirely coincidentally doing exactly what Washington requires.

As Confucius once observed: "The wise man who watches two great powers speak in unison before they act in unison should not mistake their patience for passivity." Russia and China condemned the strikes on Iran not in the language of emotion but in the precise vocabulary of sovereignty, international law, and the explicit rejection of regime change — a coordination of diplomatic framing that is itself a strategic signal. Moscow called it "pre-planned and unprovoked aggression"; Beijing declared it a "grave violation of Iran's sovereignty." That their foreign ministers spoke together, in the same terms, before any military alignment, confirms what the Master would have recognised immediately: when words are carefully chosen and delivered in harmony, they are not merely words — they are positioning.

https://youtu.be/6bm2yyiQA-g

Neither Russia nor China is rushing toward direct confrontation, for the wise strategist does not fight the battle his adversary has prepared for. Instead, both are exploiting the instability, diverting American resources, disrupting global energy markets, and repositioning for a long-term geopolitical realignment that Washington, in its neocon enthusiasm, has helpfully accelerated. The real danger is not an immediate world war — it is a prolonged proxy escalation in which the United States finds itself increasingly isolated, overextended, and holding the bill for a forever war that serves everyone's strategic interests except its own.