Before we rewind
You already know this war. You've been paying for it. A month in, Americans told Pew that gas prices were their top worry. By May, a gallon cost about 50% more than before the first strike. Brent crude went from below $70 to $119 in a single March day. Petrol is up nearly two-thirds in Nigeria, half in Pakistan, a third in Britain. Fertilizer jumped 80% in two months, so next year's bread is already dearer. Sri Lanka put its children on a four-day school week to save fuel. Nobody in any of those places voted for this.
They didn't vote for the worst case either. In August, Marjorie Taylor Greene, once one of Trump's loudest allies, posted: "They are discussing using nuclear weapons on Iran in strategy meetings. Yes you read that correctly. It's real. I'm not speculating, I know." The White House did not respond. If she's right, the first nuclear strike since Nagasaki would come from the only country that has ever dropped the bomb, on a country its own intelligence chief said was not building one. This isn't fantasy. America has never promised not to strike first. Its official nuclear policy keeps first use on the table, and since 2020 its submarines have carried a low-yield warhead, a smaller bomb that makes the choice easier to make. Meanwhile the Doomsday Clock reads 85 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been.
You'll be told this war began on February 28, 2026. It didn't. History doesn't happen in a bubble. What we're experiencing today is the latest chapter of a longer story, and when the earlier chapters are cut, the ending stops making sense. The arsonist gets to narrate the fire. Who was right and who was wrong comes down to where you start the clock.
The faces on stage are presidents, prime ministers and generals. The direction often comes from further back. We're told America is the superpower, and that Britain is a small island that "has lost an Empire and has not yet found a role." So this series keeps two questions open. Is American power used for Americans, or for the circle of names that runs through three and a half million pages of Epstein files? And did Britain's ruling class ever really lose its empire, or just stop calling it one?
Consider what never changed hands. The Crown Estate turned a £1.245 billion profit in its latest year. Less than 1% of the population owns half of England. British taxpayers finished repaying the loan that compensated slave owners for the end of slavery in 2015. The three biggest corporate tax havens on earth are British territories. And in the ten days before the bombs fell on Iran, British police arrested a former prince and a former ambassador to Washington, each on suspicion of misconduct in public office, each over ties to Jeffrey Epstein. As of this writing, neither has been charged.
Rewind runs the story backwards in seven parts: from Hormuz through the proxy wars, Iraq, the Afghan jihad, the 1953 coup in Iran and two world wars, back to the pirates, bankers and slave traders who filled the Crown's coffers. Every claim carries its receipt. Along the way we'll keep asking the question that even Israel's oldest American allies now ask out loud: why all of this, for another country? You've probably heard an answer. Hold on to it. We'll test it against the receipts.