Predictable

Friday, August 28, 2026, 9:30 PM Pacific Time.

Season 4, Episode 4.

On March 23, less than a month into the US-Israeli war with Iran, Reuters published an oil-market analysis containing a phrase that would have sounded almost unserious in another era of American power. In Reuters’ analysis, “Crude oil’s Catch-22: Pricing for Trump TACO trade makes it less likely”, traders were described as still pricing for Donald Trump to “deliver the TACO,” the Wall Street acronym for Trump Always Chickens Out. Brent crude had risen 54 percent from its February 27 close, the Strait of Hormuz had been severely disrupted, and oil markets were trying to calculate the consequences of an expanding war. Yet an expectation developed during Trump’s earlier trade confrontations had already migrated into the financial modelling of military escalation.

5 months later, the pattern had moved beyond markets.

On August 27, Reuters reported that Tehran was betting Trump would stop short of the most consequential version of his latest economic pressure campaign: aggressively enforcing secondary sanctions against major countries helping keep Iran’s economy functioning, particularly China and India. Iran could be catastrophically wrong. Washington maintains that Tehran is being progressively strangled economically, and the United States retains enormous military and financial power. The revealing development is that Iranian strategy now appears to include an estimate of Trump’s escalation threshold at all.

Photo Credit: ESA / modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2020, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO.

Then, on August 28, another layer appeared. Reuters reported that Qatar was pressing Iran toward more normal navigation through the Strait of Hormuz while sanctions and economic pressure continued. Almost simultaneously, Reuters reported that Gulf governments were accelerating investment in pipelines, ports and alternative transport routes intended to reduce their future dependence on Hormuz altogether. The sequence raises a larger question than whether Trump sometimes retreats: what happens when a political strategy built partly around uncertainty is repeated often enough that markets, adversaries, allies and institutions begin learning the conditions under which the uncertainty changes direction?

You are listening to Incorrigible Myths, an independent public-interest publication built around current affairs, human behaviour and pattern recognition through long-form analysis. The purpose is to step outside the daily headline cycle long enough to examine the forces underneath it: power, incentives, institutions, economic consequence, political narrative, psychology, status, human behaviour and the patterns that become easier to see once individual events are placed beside one another.

Incorrigible Myths is published in Canada as independent public-interest commentary and analysis, and the views expressed here are my own, grounded wherever possible in documents, credible reporting, public data and research that readers can examine for themselves. This publication operates within the democratic freedoms recognized by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, including the freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression protected under Section 2(b). Its purpose is not to instruct readers what they must believe, but to provide enough evidence and analytical structure for them to examine the argument themselves.

A note for Spotify and Apple Podcasts listeners: the written Incorrigible Myths version contains the source reporting, research, documents and hyperlinks referenced throughout this investigation. Where the evidence becomes dense, the underlying material can be examined directly in the written version.

I should also locate my own vantage point. I was born in India, later lived in the United States for several years, and now write from Canada as an Independent Writer and Geopolitical Analyst. That does not give me privileged access to truth, but it does make borders, migration, American power, Canadian dependence and the behaviour of large political systems subjects I have experienced from more than one side.

Socrates left us with a demanding intellectual habit: examine the assumptions beneath what appears obvious, ask what evidence could change our minds, and remain capable of revising conclusions when reality contradicts them. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave added another warning. Human beings can become so accustomed to representations that the shadows eventually acquire the authority of reality.

Politics provides an almost perfect laboratory for that problem because a performance of strength can become confused with strength itself, a threat can become confused with usable leverage, and repeated volatility can continue looking spontaneous even while the constraints surrounding it grow increasingly familiar.

So the question throughout PREDICTABLE is deliberately Socratic: what evidence would make us change our minds about what we think we are seeing?

1. Why Unpredictability Can Create Power:

There is nothing inherently irrational about keeping an opponent uncertain about how far one is prepared to go. Negotiation contains an informational problem. If one side knows exactly where the other’s limit sits, it can bargain toward that limit. Strategic ambiguity protects the boundary because the opponent must consider not only the most likely outcome, but also the potentially catastrophic cost of guessing incorrectly.

Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger pursued an especially stark version of this logic during the Vietnam War. Documents assembled by the National Security Archive on Nixon’s so-called Madman Theory describe efforts to persuade adversaries that Nixon might behave with sufficient extremity that conventional assumptions about restraint could not safely be trusted. Trump is not Nixon, and historical comparison becomes careless when different presidents, governments and geopolitical circumstances are collapsed into equivalence. The useful comparison concerns the mechanism: strategic unpredictability can create leverage when the other side cannot confidently identify where escalation ends.

Reuters has documented how Trump and his defenders describe unpredictability as part of his bargaining method. In Reuters’ April analysis of Trump’s reversal during the Iran war, supporters characterized his threats as a way of keeping opponents off balance and creating room for eventual de-escalation. That can work, but the strategy contains a weakness that becomes easier to see after repeated use. Its power depends partly upon the other side remaining uncertain about the boundary, and repetition gives everybody else more opportunities to search for it.

2. Repeated Games Produce Memory:

Imagine a negotiator announces a final deadline. The other party has never dealt with this person before and cannot know whether “final” genuinely means final. Waiting carries meaningful risk, so uncertainty strengthens the threat. Now imagine that the same parties encounter one another repeatedly. During one dispute, the deadline is extended; during another, an extreme opening demand is reduced after financial pressure appears; during a third, public threats intensify while private negotiations continue; during a fourth, implementation proceeds but stops before reaching the threatened maximum. The next deadline may still be dangerous, but it no longer arrives without history.

Repeated-game reasoning is useful because every encounter changes the next encounter. Governments remember how much pain the other side tolerated, companies remember which exemptions appeared, markets remember which deadlines moved, diplomats remember which pressure produced negotiations, and adversaries remember where escalation stopped. Political science adds another layer through the concept of audience costs. In James Fearon’s influential research on domestic audiences and international crises, highly visible threats can create domestic political costs for leaders who subsequently retreat. Public escalation may strengthen credibility by making withdrawal more expensive, but it can also trap a leader between the external consequences of continuing and the internal pressure to preserve an image of re