Tuesday, July 21, and Iraq's prime minister Ali al-Zaidi did not fly home from Washington to rest. He landed in Doha, and on Thursday he lands in Tehran, carrying the deals that route Iraqi oil around Iran and a demand that Iran make its own militias give up their hidden missiles before September 30.

You will hear this week that al-Zaidi is still Tehran's creature. Read what he does. A prime minister owned by Tehran does not walk into Tehran holding the paperwork that routes his country's oil around it.

The tell nobody is naming is the rial. In 1979, the year the last guard took Tehran, 70 rials bought a US dollar. By December 2025 it took 1.42 million, and the Iranian central bank governor resigned over the fall. A currency does not drop that far by accident. It drops because a country spends half a century buying rockets instead of a future.

A pariah economy that changes hands and rejoins the system watches its money climb back, the way post-war Germany did once the militarists were gone. That is the shape we teach in today's briefing, and why the day the rial stops falling will matter more than any headline out of the strikes.