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Authored by Patrick Feeley via Substack,

I. The word

Peter Thiel spent the back half of last year giving private lectures on the Antichrist, and the word has been loose in the discourse ever since. His political reading is the old one. The Antichrist is not a cartoon devil. He is the figure who arrives offering peace and safety, and who uses the fear of catastrophe to install one universal order. In Thiel's telling that figure is a regulator. He stops technology in the name of survival. The price of the peace is stagnation.

I want the frame. I do not want his conclusion.

The more probable figure is not the one who promises safety. It is the one who promises growth. Most of the world does not lie awake about existential risk from machine intelligence. It lies awake about electricity, logistics, credit, tax collection, and a median citizen who is twenty four and needs work. To that world the universal offer is not a moratorium. It is a stack. Cheap. Financed. Hosted. Present. Already attached to the handsets, the ports, and the power.

That is the soft Antichrist. It does not arrive with a speech about ending history. It arrives as the only AI that can grow your GDP.

I am not writing theology. I am writing underwriting.

II. The comforting story

The market is telling itself a story. The AI race is a contest of models. America builds the best systems. China copies. Europe regulates. Capital therefore clusters around closed labs, chipmakers, and hyperscale cloud. The scoreboard is a benchmark table.

That story is not false. It is incomplete in a way that misprices power. It treats the richest customers as the only customers that matter. It treats evaluations as destiny. It treats national power as a software demo.

I disagree.

The race will be decided by who becomes the default operating system for the economies that still have the most growth left. Those economies will not adopt AI as a lifestyle product. They will adopt it as a growth tool. They will take the stack that is cheap, present, financed, and attached to what they already run. If that stack is Chinese, Beijing does not need to conquer anyone. It only needs to become expensive to leave.

III. Where the mass actually is

When Sargasso maps AI adoption across emerging GDP rather than across model releases, the picture is not the one the market is priced for.

Start with the denominator. On purchasing power terms, IMF projections for 2026 put China at about $44.3 trillion against $32.4 trillion for the United States. India is near $18.9 trillion. Indonesia clears $5.4 trillion and Brazil $5.2 trillion. Turkey is at $4.0 trillion, Mexico $3.6 trillion, Saudi Arabia $2.9 trillion, Egypt $2.6 trillion, Nigeria $2.4 trillion. Nominal dollars still flatter America, and by a wide margin. China's nominal print is about $20.9 trillion against the same $32.4 trillion for the United States. Both numbers are true. They answer different questions. Nominal tells you who can buy foreign assets. PPP tells you how much physical and administrative activity there is to automate. For an adoption thesis, the second number is the one that matters.

Ray Dalio has been describing the political consequence in plain terms. He calls it a tribute system. A hierarchical order in which leaders travel to Beijing to acknowledge relative power in exchange for access and stability. He ties it to a growing view abroad that American security guarantees will not be honored under stress. I take the framing seriously. I do not treat it as scripture. Ports and rail were the first set of rails. Models will be the next set.

IV. The evidence is already in the download data

This part of the argument is no longer speculative.

Over roughly four years, the American share of model downloads on Hugging Face fell from about sixty percent to the mid teens by late 2025, according to reporting in The Wire China. Hugging Face's own one year review of the DeepSeek moment is blunt on the composition shift. DeepSeek R1 became the most liked model on the platform in its history. The top of that list is no longer majority American. Baidu went from zero public Hugging Face releases in 2024 to more than one hundred in 2025. ByteDance and Tencent raised their release counts eight to nine fold. Of newly created models under a year old, downloads for Chinese models surpassed any other country, including the United States. Western startups and researchers now routinely fine tune Chinese base models because those are the largest open weights available.

The Wire China's Southeast Asia reporting puts the commercial logic in local language. A Jakarta lab head said developers will always pick the cheapest one. A Malaysian founder said he wants the biggest model and there is no Western open source offering at that size. Chinese cloud providers were running thirty seven availability zones across six Southeast Asian regions against thirty across four for the Western field.

None of this shows up cleanly in a frontier benchmark table. All of it shows up in switching costs three years from now.

V. The institutional layer

Beijing is not leaving the volume layer to price alone. In July 2026 it stood up the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization in Shanghai, with twenty nine founding members. Public reporting names Russia, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Indonesia, Brazil, and a broader set spanning Africa and Latin America among the signatories. The five year commitments attached to the body, as reported by Caixin and The Diplomat, are unglamorous and therefore serious. Training placements. Joint application centers with regional blocs. A weather early warning system deployed into dozens of countries.

Read that list as an underwriter. Training placements create the administrators who will write the next procurement. Application centers create the reference deployments. Weather systems create dependency inside a ministry that cannot afford an outage. Standards get set that way. Not with a better model. With a bureaucracy that has already learned one.

VI. America is running the right play against the wrong clock

Washington understands the problem. Executive Order 14320, signed July 23, 2025, created the American AI Exports Program to push full stack packages abroad. Chips, models, applications, cybersecurity, cloud, and data centers sold together. Analysis from the Institute for Progress argues the contested emerging markets that should sit at the center of that effort include Brazil, Egypt, Indonesia, Nigeria, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Bangladesh. That is the correct map. It is essentially the map in this piece.

The tension is that the same government running an export promotion program is running an export control program, and the second one moves faster than the first. The UAE's status was upgraded only in July 2026, and even then chip access was scoped to approved entities. Meanwhile Huawei has been shopping Ascend parts into the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Thailand, and courting Egypt directly. Beijing has published a self sufficiency ambition on a near term horizon and is moving to expand domestic AI chip output.

Set aside whether the controls are correct on the merits. Underwrite the second order effect. Capability still flows outward through commercial relationships and distillation. American open efforts start constrained at home. The result is a one way street into the volume layer of the world economy, at exactly the moment when the volume layer is where the standard gets set.

Western discourse is spending its attention elsewhere. Alignment theater. Synthetic media. White collar displacement in rich cities. Those are real problems. They are also rich country problems. The quieter failure is dependency. Once an emerging state's logistics, credit, schools, and revenue collection run on foreign models, switching stops being a procurement decision. It becomes a sovereignty decision. Sovereignty decisions do not get made on price.

VII. The map I would force into any serious strategy memo

When we screen a country the way we screen a company, we are not asking which model it admires. We are asking what it has already installed, who financed the installation, and what it would cost to rip out.

Asia. India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Cambodia, Laos, Sri Lanka.

Middle East and Gulf. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Turkey, Iran.

Africa. Nigeria, Ethiopia, Kenya, South Africa, Angola, Ghana.

Latin America. Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Colombia.

These are not equivalent cases. India can build its own. The Gulf can simply buy, and is buying from both sides. Vietnam and Indonesia industrialize and will take whatever shortens the industrialization. Nigeria and Ethiopia need administration and power far more than they need chat interfaces. Brazil and Mexico live between Western finance and Chinese trade and will hedge accordingly. Pakistan and Kazakhstan sit on corridors Beijing already financed once.

The common variable is growth urgency. Growth urgency selects the stack that shows up, and it selects it quickly.

VIII. The throat

Compute is the oil of this cycle, and the supply chain has a throat. Counterpoint Research put TSMC at seventy three percent of the pure play foundry market in the second quarter of 2026. Its position at the leading nodes is more concentrated than that headline suggests.

You do not need an invasion scenario to price the leverage. You need governments that come to believe only one counterpart can reliably keep the chips, the cloud, the handsets, and the financing flowing. That belief is cheaper to create than a fab and harder to reverse than a tariff.

IX. Two futures

In the first, America wins the cathedral. Benchmarks stay American. Safety papers multiply. Closed models remain impressive and expensive. Emerging economies still buy the stack attached to Chinese devices, Chinese capital, and turnkey Chinese infrastructure. Global token volume follows global GDP, which is to say it follows the parish. The United States keeps the prestige and loses the installed base.

In the second, America treats emerging GDP as the actual battlefield. Competitive open weights exist and are hostable by states that want an alternative to Beijing without becoming a tenant of a single American lab. Energy, chips, and cloud are treated as national goods rather than as line items. The public companies that can genuinely deploy AI into durable operations are valued above the ones that can only demonstrate it.

Markets are priced closer to the first future than the evidence supports. That gap is the part I care about.

X. This is the same thesis, widened

In Pilot Purgatory I argued that AI works and capital is available, and that the binding constraint is organizational. Companies cannot absorb what they have bought. Forty two S&P 500 companies captured 312 percent of the index's price return since ChatGPT while the other 458 captured 38 percent. Fifty eight percent of small and mid cap companies claim an AI strategy and under one percent describe implementation as mature.

That was a governance problem inside public companies. Widen the aperture by one order of magnitude and it is the same problem at the level of the state. Intelligence is being manufactured at declining cost. Absorption is the bottleneck. When Sargasso underwrites a company, the question is whether the organization can metabolize the technology it has already purchased. Run that question at the level of a country with weak administrative capacity and urgent growth targets, and the answer is worse. That is precisely why the party that clears the bottleneck earns something more durable than a product cycle. It writes the rails under the next order.

XI. What I would underwrite

If you underwrite AI as a feature race between rich country labs, you will be right about the models and wrong about the century.

Underwrite instead who owns the rails that India, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Vietnam, Nigeria, Egypt, and Turkey will actually run. Underwrite who captures adoption where governance is thin and growth is urgent. Underwrite the closed labs and the national champions as though their real competitor is not the next chat interface, but a hierarchy that intends to make itself impossible to leave.

The AI race that matters is not who builds the smartest model in the richest city. It is who becomes the operating system for the economies that still have the most growth left in them.

This is not a recommendation. It is my map.

Sargasso Capital Management is a constructivist investment firm. This post is research and commentary. It is not an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security or interest in any fund.

Sources

1. Fortune, "Peter Thiel is delivering 4 private sold-out lectures at a club in San Francisco, about the Antichrist," September 2, 2025. Link; Reason, "I listened to over 7 hours of Peter Thiel's leaked Antichrist lectures," October 14, 2025. Link
2. Visual Capitalist, "The World's Largest Economies in 2026, Nominal vs. PPP," using IMF World Economic Outlook projections. Link; IMF DataMapper, GDP based on PPP. Link
3. Fortune, "Ray Dalio says China's ascent ushers in era of 'tribute system,'" May 16, 2026. Link; Fortune, "Ray Dalio just finished a 10-day trip to China," June 24, 2026. Link
4. The Wire China, "Surrounding American AI from the South," June 21, 2026. Link
5. Hugging Face, "One Year Since the 'DeepSeek Moment,'" January 20, 2026. Link
6. Reuters, "Twenty-nine countries sign agreement to establish global AI cooperation body," July 16, 2026. Link; Caixin Global, "China Launches Shanghai-Based AI Governance Body With 29 Founding Nations," July 17, 2026. Link; The Diplomat, "With New AI Governance Organization, China Seeks to Formalize Its Global AI Influence," July 2026. Link
7. Executive Order 14320, "Promoting the Export of the American AI Technology Stack," July 23, 2025. Link; Institute for Progress, "America's AI Exports Program." Link
8. Morgan Lewis, "BIS Upgrades UAE Export Control Status, with AI Chip Access Limited to Approved Entities," July 2026. Link
9. South China Morning Post, "Huawei eyes export of AI chips to Middle East, Southeast Asia to rival Nvidia," July 12, 2025. Link
10. Bloomberg via Free Malaysia Today, "Huawei pitches AI chips to Egypt in test of US tech diplomacy," August 26, 2026. Link
11. RCR Wireless, "China aims to triple AI chip output," August 28, 2025. Link
12. Counterpoint Research, Global Pure Foundry Market Share, Q2 2026. Link
13. Sargasso Capital Management, Pilot Purgatory, May 6, 2026. Link

Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance

It was announced this past week that Rick Santelli will be retiring next month.

So today I offer a tribute to perhaps the last man standing on CNBC with a functioning economics textbook, and one of the few figures in financial media who could simply tell you that one plus one equaled two without disappearing into an academic sounding, postmodern, jargon filled bullshit word salad that somehow ended with the conclusion that paying a quadrillion dollars a day in interest on the national debt while inflation ran at 10% was a sign of economic prosperity.

Santelli has been on CNBC for years, but his appearances, especially more recently, often seemed confined to a few precious minutes talking about Treasuries, yields, the Fed and the macro picture. But he never let the limited airtime limit the subject matter.

He used those short spots to shoehorn in a daily reminder that supply and demand had not been repealed, incentives still mattered, capital actually had a cost, debt was still debt, and governments had not discovered some previously unknown branch of mathematics in which borrowing and spending enormous amounts of money made everyone permanently richer.

What was supposed to be a quick update on the 10 year Treasury routinely became a five minute crash course in basic economics, usually delivered with the urgency of a man driving who desperately needs to piss and just learned the next rest stop is still 90 miles away.

That was what made him such a breath of fresh air. There was always a healthy Austrian school instinct underneath the commentary: skepticism toward central planning, respect for price signals, suspicion of artificially cheap money, and the old fashioned belief that markets contain information that policymakers might want to consider before deciding they know better.

None of this should have been particularly radical, but in modern financial media, suggesting that there might be consequences to borrowing trillions of dollars can occasionally make you sound like you arrived at the studio carrying a musket and a copy of The Road to Serfdom.

Santelli also had the irritating habit of asking what might happen after the thing everyone else was busy celebrating. If rates were going to stay at zero forever, perhaps there would be consequences. If Washington was going to spend another trillion dollars, perhaps somebody should ask where the trillion dollars came from. If the Fed was going to flood the system with liquidity, perhaps asset prices would cease to be entirely reliable indicators of underlying economic health. If inflation appeared after an extraordinary monetary and fiscal expansion, perhaps we didn’t need a team of PhDs to discover an entirely new explanation for it.

His real offense was refusing to participate in one of the great linguistic achievements of modern economics, where unpleasant concepts can apparently be eliminated simply by giving them nicer names. Debt became stimulus, government spending became investment, money printing became liquidity, bailouts became stabilization, intervention became support, and inflation became transitory.

Rick would sit there listening to all of this and eventually ask the embarrassingly unsophisticated question that everyone else had somehow managed to avoid: who is actually paying for all this shit?

You could almost feel the collective discomfort through the television. Somewhere a strategist had prepared seventeen slides explaining why an additional $2 trillion of government borrowing was bullish for equities, while Santelli was committing the social faux pas of wondering where the f*ck the money was actually coming from…

“Do you think I want to take a shower every hour? The last place I'm ever gonna live or work is D.C.” - Rick Santelli

That was the beauty of a Santelli segment. He could begin with the perfectly innocent observation that the 10 year yield had moved four basis points and, five minutes later, somehow be halfway through an impromptu seminar on central banking, fiscal policy, monetary debasement, moral hazard, government incentives, price discovery and the accumulated economic wisdom of several centuries…all while making a face like he was passing a bladder stone the size of a regulation size WNBA basketball.

And just as he was arriving at some crucial economic question upon whose answer the survival of free markets and Western civilization depended, someone would remind him that they had to go to commercial.

Most financial television can spend an hour producing five minutes of genuinely useful information. Santelli somehow had the opposite problem. He was perpetually trying to stuff an hour of economic common sense into the five minutes he had been allotted. You could practically sense the control room watching the clock while Rick attempted to explain why $30 trillion, then $32 trillion, then $34 trillion of debt might conceivably deserve more attention than whether the latest CPI print was one tenth above or below consensus.

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And whether you agreed with every Santelli rant was never really the point. I certainly don’t think you had to. What mattered was that somebody was willing to challenge the premise of the conversation rather than merely debate the approved range of conclusions. Maybe debt isn’t wealth. Maybe borrowing isn’t saving. Maybe government spending doesn’t become productive investment simply because somebody puts the word “investment” in the name of the bill. Maybe artificially suppressing the price of capital for years creates distortions. Maybe incentives matter more than intentions.

Most importantly, Santelli understood the concept that seems to disappear fastest whenever Washington or the Fed gets involved: tradeoffs. Every policy has a cost, every intervention changes incentives, every subsidy encourages something, every tax discourages something, every artificially cheap dollar of capital ends up somewhere, and every debt ultimately belongs to somebody.

There is no free lunch, even when Congress has renamed the lunch the American Prosperity and Strategic Lunch Affordability Act and the Congressional Budget Office has produced a chart showing that it pays for itself in 2047.

That perspective made Santelli unusual because financial media is generally very good at explaining what happened over the previous fifteen minutes. Rick was often more interested in what happens over the next fifteen years. He brought historical memory into conversations that sometimes seemed to assume economic history began at the previous Fed meeting, and he maintained an almost pathological attachment to the idea that economic principles continue to operate even when acknowledging them would be inconvenient.

A good Santelli rant was part economics lecture, part old school “go f*ck yourself” style Chicago trading floor, part ideological argument and part angry drunk uncle at Thanksgiving. Underneath the theatrics, though, the message was remarkably consistent. Markets matter because prices contain information. Incentives matter because people respond to them. Debt matters because eventually somebody has to service it. Interest rates matter because capital is not supposed to be free. Supply and demand matter because declaring something affordable does not create more of it.

Most of all, arithmetic matters because reality has an annoying habit of refusing to participate in whatever narrative happens to be fashionable at the moment.

Here’s some of my favorite Santelli rants for you to enjoy. His commentary on Obama’s mortgage plan:

Commenting on the US’s debt downgrade during Obama:

Destroying Steve Liesman on mortgages:

Laying bare that QE can never end:

Questioning why we can never get out of crisis mode:

And finally, Santelli taking Aaron Ross-Sorkin to task on Covid restrictions when the debate had just started taking place during Covid:

Rick Santelli at his best was skeptical, argumentative, occasionally volcanic, frequently hilarious and stubbornly unwilling to pretend that changing the terminology changed the underlying economics. In a financial media culture that can sometimes confuse consensus with wisdom and complexity with sophistication, he remained attached to a handful of remarkably simple questions. What are the incentives? Where is the money coming from? What happens to prices? What are the unintended consequences? And, eventually, who pays?

The questions Rick asked weren’t especially glamorous, but they have survived every economic fad invented to avoid answering them. Just as Santelli’s legacy will do, no matter how many guest spots MSNBC gives to Elizabeth Warren, Paul Krugman, Jeremy Siegel and Zohran Mamdani in the future. Godspeed, Rick.

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QTR’s Disclaimer: Please read my full legal disclaimer on my About page here. This post represents my opinions only. In addition, please understand I am an idiot and very often get things wrong and lose money. I may own or transact in any names mentioned in this piece at any time without warning, meaning if I’m long I could sell or if I’m short I could cover at any time.

Contributor posts, guest posts and curated posts have been hand selected by me, but have not been fact checked and are the opinions of their authors. They are either submitted to QTR by their author or reprinted under a Creative Commons license with my best effort to uphold what the license asks, or with the permission of the author.

I cannot guarantee the accuracy of any or all facts and figures included in this article though I made an effort to get them right. I have been wrong before and will be wrong again, and encourage you to always double check, do your own research and speak to a licensed financial professional, which I am not.

This is not a recommendation to buy or sell any stocks or securities, just my opinions. I often lose money on positions I trade/invest in. I may add any name mentioned in this article and sell any name mentioned in this piece at any time, without further warning. None of this is a solicitation to buy or sell securities. I may or may not own names I write about and are watching. Sometimes I’m bullish without owning things, sometimes I’m bearish and do own things I’m bearish on. Just assume my positions could be exactly the opposite of what you think they are just in case. If I’m long I could quickly be short and vice versa. I won’t update my positions.

Starting in 2026, I have been attempting to no longer actively trade as much as I once did (read my story here). My goal is for my investing/saving to be done by recurring contributions mostly to sector ETFs and a few select equities, trusted third parties who oversee my accounts, and advisors. Such advisors or funds, through individual equities, options, index funds, mutual funds, ETFs, or other securities, may have positions in, exposure to, or holdings of names mentioned herein that I know nothing about. It is possible I could own, have exposure to, or not own anything, at any point. In an attempt to lead a healthier lifestyle, I’ve also excluded myself from fantasy sports, sports betting, online and in-person casinos and prediction markets.

Any of my positions can change immediately as soon as I publish, with or without notice and at any point I can be long, short or neutral on any position. You are on your own. Do not make decisions based on my blog. I exist on the fringe. If you see numbers and calculations of any sort, assume they are wrong and double check them. I failed Algebra in 8th grade and topped off my high school math accolades by getting a D- in remedial Calculus my senior year, before becoming an English major in college so I could bullshit my way through things easier. Hence, why I am a writer.

The publisher does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the information provided in this page. These are not the opinions of any of my employers, partners, or associates. I did my best to be honest about my disclosures but can’t guarantee I am right; I write these posts after a couple beers sometimes. Many times I edit after my posts are published because I’m impatient and lazy, so if you see a typo, check back in a half hour.

Also, again I just straight up get shit wrong a lot. I mention it multiple times because it’s that important you understand.

Three weeks after we noted that NANO Nuclear Energy's vertical-integration strategy was beginning to look more like a physical fuel cycle than a corporate slide deck, the company has delivered a pair of updates spanning both ends of the nuclear value chain.

NANO’s announcement from Thursday details ongoing progress for the design of a circulation pump for cooling their KRONOS reactor, and Friday's announcement describes the multi-prong agreement with a new engineering firm for developing their nuclear fuels business segment.

$NNE NANO Nuclear and Howden, a Baker Hughes Business, Advance Engineering Collaboration for the KRONOS MMR™ Primary Helium Circulator to Detailed Design Phasehttps://t.co/ueOKR7DcOp

— NANO Nuclear Energy (NASDAQ: NNE) (@nano_nuclear) September 3, 2026

Development of the primary helium circulator was moved from preliminary engineering to detailed design. Howden, a Baker Hughes subsidiary following the acquisition of Chart Industries, is “building upon the reactor performance requirements established by NANO Nuclear.”

The helium circulator is one of the most critical components of high-temperature gas-cooled reactors like NANO's KRONOS design. It moves helium coolant through the reactor to transfer heat from the core and out to the secondary system.

Howden has established a “mature technical foundation” which allows for further optimization in manufacturing planning.

Jay Yu, Founder and Chairman of NANO Nuclear Energy, noted:

"each engineering milestone strengthens the industrial ecosystem supporting KRONOS while further positioning the program for future first-of-a-kind deployment and long-term commercial success."

The day after announcing progress with the circulator, NANO released a statement detailing a new agreement with Enveniam.

The MOU establishes a collaboration between the two companies addressing a wide range of operations across the nuclear value chain. The press release points to six principle workstreams under the combined effort:

• Nuclear fuel transportation
• Conversion and deconversion
• Microreactor commercialization
• Advanced manufacturing
• Domestic fuel supply chain
• Commercial energy markets

James Walker, Chief Executive Officer of NANO Nuclear Energy, highlights:

"Enveniam's capabilities closely align with our expertise and business plans across these critical workflows. We believe this collaboration can help us evaluate projects more efficiently, identify execution risks earlier and build stronger delivery plans as opportunities advance toward definitive agreements."

Most notably, this new work between NANO and Enveniam follows the announcement last year that Enveniam will be serving as Lead Project Integrator for LIS Technologies.

There, Enveniam will lead “the design, development, and construction of the LIST laser-based uranium enrichment facility.”

LIS Technologies and NANO Nuclear are working together to develop a vertically integrated fuel chain, with LIS fulfilling the enrichment stage. NANO is working on multiple other stages of the fuel chain, to include conversion and deconversion, fuel fabrication, and fuel transportation.

Roughly 11 days after CIA Director John Ratcliffe unexpectedly traveled to Moscow and reportedly floated a trilateral summit involving President Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner arrived in Moscow on Saturday morning.

"Dmitriev was deep in conversation with Witkoff and Kushner as they stepped onto Russian soil for key Ukraine talks," Russian media outlet RT wrote on X, accompanying the post with footage of the US delegation's arrival.

Dmitriev deep in conversation with Witkoff and Kushner as they step onto Russian soil for key Ukraine talks https://t.co/eC8u8gbJVe pic.twitter.com/DIksgrUj54

— RTRussia (@RT_Russia_) September 5, 2026

Russian outlet Sputnik reported that Putin had ordered a three-day pause in strikes on Kiev just as Witkoff and Kushner arrived in Russia for peace talks.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stated:

• The pause in strikes on Kyiv is linked to preparations for and the holding of meetings with American negotiators there.
• The Russian president will meet US negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner at the Kremlin later Saturday.

Putin orders halt to strikes on Kiev for three days, starting from midnight today - Kremlin

Other statements by Dmitry Peskov:

??The pause in strikes on Kiev is linked to the preparation and holding of meetings with American negotiators there

??The Russian president will meet… pic.twitter.com/MJ0g4pWizr

— Sputnik (@SputnikInt) September 5, 2026

Witkoff and Kushner are scheduled to meet Putin before traveling to Kyiv on Sunday, marking their first visit to Ukraine since the war began.

Bloomberg reports that expectations for a breakthrough peace deal to end the war remain low.

The Kremlin said there was "no talk of new ideas," while describing Moscow's negotiating position as "unshakeable.” Russia continues to demand that Kiev surrender the entirety of four regions claimed by Moscow and abandon its NATO ambitions, conditions that Kiev rejects.

The diplomatic push comes as intensifying attacks by both sides around the Black Sea raise the risk of a global food crisis next year. Meanwhile, Ukrainian attacks on Russian energy infrastructure, combined with disrupted Persian Gulf flows, are pushing the global refined-products market toward crisis, creating twin food and energy risks.

The visit merely suggests an intensifying Trump administration campaign to reopen high-level negotiating channels ahead of the midterm elections in the US and end the Russia-Ukraine war after more than four years of costly fighting.

Summary:

• CENTCOM Confirms Iranian Tankers Hit Near Kharg Island
• Iranian Tanker Reportedly Hit By Missiles Near Kharg Island

CENTCOM Confirms Strikes 

US Central Command confirmed on X that US forces struck three Iranian oil tankers after the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps launched ballistic missiles toward two US Navy warships. 

CENTCOM provided details:

Following Iran's failed attacks, CENTCOM permanently disabled the IRGC crude oil carriers M/T Downy off the coast of Kharg Island and M/T Stark 1 near Jask. American forces also completely destroyed the unladen crude oil carrier M/T Kylo (also known as the "Noxen") in the Gulf of Oman, striking the vessel in multiple critical locations to render it inoperable after the crew was directed to abandon ship.

The three Iranian crude oil tankers are part of a multibillion-dollar shadow network that funds the IRGC and its regional proxies. Iran has no means by which to defend them.

CENTCOM commander Adm. Brad Cooper stated:

Let the message to the IRGC be clear: If you shoot at two of our ships, we will impose an even higher economic cost —taking out three of yours. 

We will not hesitate to defend American forces, and if necessary, destroy Iran's limited and exposed oil fleet. 

https://t.co/Xo0Vj0t2AJ

— U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM) September 5, 2026

The key question heading into Sunday evening is how Brent crude futures will price the US strikes on Iranian tankers near Kharg Island. 

Iranian Tanker Reportedly Hit By Missiles Near Kharg Island

Iranian state media reported early Saturday that US forces had struck an oil tanker near Kharg Island. Although the US military has not confirmed the maritime incident, the attack, if verified, would mark a significant escalation near Iran's most important crude-export terminal and increase the risk of further disruptions to Persian Gulf energy flows.

Tasnim News Agency, which is affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, said several missiles hit the tanker early Saturday and published images purportedly showing black smoke rising from the ship.

Video of the Iranian oil tanker which was reportedly hit this morning by the US near the Iranian Kharg Island. pic.twitter.com/217O0lLn09

— Mehdi H. (@mhmiranusa) September 5, 2026

Kharg Island is the jugular vein of Iran's oil economy. The deepwater terminal handles about 90% of the country's crude exports, connecting Iran's major onshore fields to global markets, specifically China. 

Henri Patricot, CFA, a Paris-based energy equity research analyst at UBS, published Kpler data showing that crude loadings at major Iranian export terminals, including Kharg, have been significantly reduced over the course of the six-month conflict.

Weekly average crude loadings in the Middle East by port location also show a slight recovery on an ex-Iran basis across the major Gulf producers.

Average flows through Kharg have ranged from 1.5 million to 2 million barrels per day, although the data above show that those volumes collapsed to roughly 220,000 to 255,000 barrels per day in August under the US naval blockade. The island also contains massive storage facilities, pipelines, and loading berths. Any attack by US forces, whether kinetic through air-delivered munitions, or offensive cyber operations, could cripple Tehran's largest moneymaker.

President Trump warned Friday that the US could soon attack Pickaxe Mountain, a suspected Iranian nuclear facility.

As for Hormuz flows, Goldman commodities strategist Yulia Zhestkova Grigsby and her team said this week that they had to revise tanker-flow estimates sharply higher (full note available here for pro subs), suggesting that Tehran's ability to control the strategic maritime chokepoint has been significantly degraded.

Grigsby and her team told clients on Wednesday that Gulf oil exports had recovered to between 15 million and 16 million barrels per day, roughly two-thirds of prewar levels.

However, Grigsby pointed out that visible tanker data show flows of only about 10 million barrels per day on a seven-day moving average. That 5 million-barrel-per-day gap reflects what Goldman's energy team called the "rise of dark transits." In other words, tankers are switching off their Automatic Identification System transponders to avoid detection by Iran.

Net hit to Persian Gulf flows of 7.9mb/d now 

Polymarket odds that Tehran will lose control of Kharg Island stand at 2% by Sept. 30 and just 7% by year-end.

What the Trump administration decides to do with Kharg remains the energy market's billion-dollar question.