realpolitik9

Fair cop on the headers, I write these at 2am and it shows. But on the diplomatic/commercial thing. Iran charges ~$1/barrel in yuan through Kunlun Bank. That's real money through real channels. And the access list keeps expanding, started with 5 countries in March and now it's 10+. If this were purely diplomatic the list would be stable, but it's growing like a customer base. You could argue the fee follows the politics and not the other way around but then why yuan specifically, and why route it through Kunlun Bank with a per-barrel rate structure. Every transit builds volume through yuan settlement channels that bypass dollar clearing. The Danish Sound Dues ran for 400 years on the same logic, different rates for different nations depending on who Denmark was allied with. None of this is new, it's just never been done at 20% of global oil supply before