The New Doctrine Reshaping Global Markets

Back in January, I published a piece arguing that the United States’ Caracas raid and arrest of Nicolás Maduro was not a one-off event but a pilot episode. I called it the dawn of Imperium Americanum – a shift away from the old model of global governance and diplomatic restraint toward something much more direct: accumulating strategic assets, fortifying supply chains, and eliminating perceived threats.

I said that the next 11 months would be the most aggressive stretch of American foreign policy in living memory and that investors needed to reposition accordingly.

Well, alongside Venezuela, Greenland, and the increasingly militarized U.S.–Mexico border, I would like to submit additional evidence into the record: Cuba and Iran.

In recent weeks, both nations have moved abruptly from diplomatic friction to direct confrontation with Washington. In Cuba, the United States has tightened the economic vise around an already collapsing regime while opening channels that could lead to a “managed transition.” And in Iran, tensions escalated far faster – from protests and nuclear brinkmanship to a full-scale joint U.S.-Israeli military campaign that targeted the regime itself. Different theaters, different tools. Same strategic logic.

At some point, a pattern stops being a pattern and becomes a doctrine. 

The United States of America has moved into the acquisition business. And if you aren’t positioned for it, you are leaving serious money on the table.

The Donroe Doctrine: America’s New Foreign Policy Strategy

Let’s set the scene with a brief timeline because the velocity of events matters as much as the events themselves.

January 3: Operation Absolute Resolve. U.S. forces extract Nicolás Maduro from Caracas. He’s flown to New York to face drug charges. Days later, at the State of the Union address, President Trump boasts that the U.S. government has taken possession of over 80 million barrels of Venezuelan oil – not secured or protected; taken. That is the language of plundering, not peacekeeping.

January 3-9: Trump, emboldened by the Caracas operation, immediately pivots to warning other nations in the Western Hemisphere. He says U.S. military force is “always an option” to seize Greenland from NATO ally Denmark. His deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, goes on CNN to declare that the U.S. has a right to Greenland, full stop. Then his wife Katie Miller tweets a map of Greenland covered in the Stars and Stripes with the caption: “SOON.” Not exactly subtle.

January-February: Trump says that Cuba “looks like it’s ready to fall,” and Secretary of State Marco Rubio – a Cuban-American with a personal stake in the island’s politics – warns Havana’s leadership that they are “in a lot of trouble.” Cuba’s oil supply from Venezuela has been cut off. The island is economically asphyxiating. Regime change by strangulation is already underway.

February 28: Operation Epic Fury. Joint U.S. and Israeli forces launch an attack against Iran – targeting missiles, air defenses, nuclear facilities, military infrastructure, and the country’s supreme leader himself. Ali Khamenei is assassinated in the opening wave. Iran’s Assembly of Experts, the body that would choose his successor, sees its meeting place destroyed in a subsequent strike. The United States and Israel did not consult the UN Security Council, convene with NATO, or wait for any second opinion. It acted decisively.

Trump dubbed his approach the “Donroe Doctrine” – a self-named spin on the Monroe Doctrine that drops all pretense of multilateralism. The New York Times noted it was “the most blunt acknowledgment yet of his worldview”: that national strength – not laws, treaties, or conventions – is the deciding factor when powers collide.

The doctrine may have been declared in Caracas. But its real test was always going to come somewhere far bigger.

Iran and the New Era of Power Politics

If Venezuela was the proof of concept, Iran is the proof of scale.

Beginning in January, massive anti-government protests swept more than 100 Iranian cities – the largest uprising since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps responded with live ammunition, mounted machine guns, and drone suppression of crowds. Thousands were killed. In a Truth Social post, Trump urged Iranian protesters to continue and said that “help is on its way.” He then sent two carrier strike groups to the Middle East, the largest naval buildup in the region since the 2003 Iraq invasion.

In early February, there were nuclear negotiations in Oman. Iran rejected a proposal for a civilian nuclear program with American investment in exchange for full dismantlement. On Feb. 27, embassies began evacuating Tehran. On Feb. 28, the campaign began.

What happened next separates this operation from nearly every U.S. military engagement of the past three decades. This was not a punitive strike or a “shaping operation.” It was a campaign aimed at removing the regime entirely – one that also intended to permanently destroy Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs. 

By day nine of the conflict, the U.S. and Israel had struck Iran’s oil storage depots and refining facilities for the first time. Iran had fired over 500 ballistic missiles and nearly 2,000 drones at U.S. and Israeli targets. Oil briefly spiked toward $120 a barrel before whipsawing lower as markets priced in the possibility of Iranian regime collapse. The Strait of Hormuz – the chokepoint through which roughly 20% of the world’s oil flows – has been partially shut, with Iran restricting or halting passage for vessels tied to the United States, Israel, and their allies while allowing limited commercial traffic from other nations to continue.

Let me be direct: this conflict is not just a foreign policy event. It is a market-restructuring event.

Energy flows, defense procurement, and the global gold market are already reacting to the shift.

Investors who position early will capture the upside. Those who wait for “clarity” will be buying after the move.

Greenland and Cuba: Strategic Assets in Play

I won’t dwell here because the situation with Iran demands most of our attention. But Greenland and Cuba deserve a mention as well.

Greenland – sitting atop one of the world’s largest rare earth and uranium deposits and astride the Arctic shipping lanes that China and Russia covet – remains an active acquisition target. Trump ordered Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) to develop invasion plans before walking it back slightly at Davos. The rhetoric has cooled from ‘hot war with a NATO ally’ to ‘very aggressive negotiation,’ but the strategic intent hasn’t changed. This administration wants that island, one way or another. And now that Washington has demonstrated in two different arenas that it is willing to use force, Denmark and the EU are negotiating from a very different position than they were six months ago.

Cuba, for its part, is being strategically suffocated. Following a broader U.S. strategy of cutting off Cuban allies, the nation’s economy is collapsing as it experiences acute shortages of fuel, food, and money. Trump has floated a “friendly takeover,” with Rubio engaged in ‘high-level discussions’ with representatives of the Cuban government. Whether Cuba falls on its own or gets a push, another item on the Imperium Americanum checklist gets ticked.

Both are important threads. But Iran is the main event.

The Geopolitical Investing Playbook

In January, I gave you the Imperial Basket for 2026. I said to buy the “Operational Tempo” stocks – the drones, surveillance tools, and intelligence platforms. I stand by that framework completely – and the events in Iran have only accelerated those theses.

But Iran adds new dimensions that Venezuela and Greenland didn’t. Here is how the portfolio needs to evolve:

Gold: The Safe Haven In an Era of Conflict

When the world’s largest military starts assassinating supreme leaders and striking nuclear facilities, gold goes up. Even during the prelude to the Iran strikes, global gold prices surged as markets began pricing in the probability of a wider Middle East war.

Gold is no longer just a dollar-hedge or an inflation trade. In the Imperium Americanum era, it is the insurance policy against a world where the rules-based order has been replaced by something considerably more improvisational. 

Own gold, miners, and royalty companies. This is the bedrock of any portfolio that is serious about the new regime.

Energy: Oil Volatility and Reconstruction Opportunities

Oil briefly touched $120 before pulling back. Here is the real setup investors should focus on: the near-term direction of oil is volatile and bidirectional, depending on how quickly Iranian supply is disrupted versus restored.

The Hormuz threat is real, but the situation is more complex than a simple blockade. Iran has restricted passage for Western-aligned vessels while allowing limited traffic from neutral trading partners. That means the strait remains unstable without being completely shut – a scenario that keeps a permanent geopolitical risk premium embedded in energy prices.

The medium-term trade is more interesting. If the Iranian regime collapses and a pro-Western government emerges – which is the explicit goal of Operation Epic Fury – the reconstruction of Iran’s oil infrastructure becomes one of the largest energy investment opportunities of the decade. Iran sits on the world’s fourth-largest proven oil reserves. The upstream and midstream companies positioned for that reentry will be generational wealth builders.

In the near term, own diversified energy producers with Gulf Coast refining exposure. In the medium term, watch for the Iran reconstruction play. The same logic that made Valero (VLO) the pure-play on Venezuelan sludge applies to Iranian crude at scale.

Defense Op-Tempo: The Original Thesis, Now Even Stronger

Everything I said in January about the distinction between Program stocks – Lockheed Martin (LMT) or Northrop Grumman (NOC) – and Op-Tempo stocks – Kratos (KTOS), BlackSky (BKSY), Planet Labs (PL), Palantir (PLTR) – has been validated in real time. 

The Iran conflict is an intelligence-led, precision-strike, high-tempo war – exactly the kind the Imperium Americanum regime runs. You burn through attritable drones, buy intelligence from commercial satellite providers, and run the whole thing through an AI-powered command and control dashboard.

The Op-Tempo basket remains intact. The Iran conflict has simply expanded the addressable market and shortened the reorder cycle.

AI Infrastructure: The Nervous System of Modern Power

This is the addition that January’s piece didn’t fully explore. 

Running a multi-theater empire – Venezuela, Greenland negotiations, Iranian combat operations, Cuban economic pressure, and Hormuz monitoring – requires an AI-powered command infrastructure of staggering complexity. The power, compute, and networking infrastructure that feeds those systems must be built and scaled aggressively.

The AI industrial buildout is not just a technology story. It is the literal nervous system of Imperium Americanum. The companies building the physical stack – power generation, grid infrastructure, high-efficiency computing – are as essential to this new empire as the drones and the carriers. 

Don’t separate the geopolitical thesis from the AI infrastructure thesis. They are the same.

Three Rules for Investing In the New Geopolitical Order

Two months ago, I gave you three rules. They’ve held up perfectly, but developments in Iran give us the opportunity to sharpen them:

Rule #1: The White House is the CIO of American power, and it’s on a deadline. The November midterms are nine months away, and the probability of a House flip remains elevated. As such, this administration is not slowing down – it is accelerating. The fact that it moved on Iran while still managing Venezuela and Greenland tells you exactly how much bandwidth it believes it has.

Rule #2: The geopolitical risk premium is now a permanent feature, not a temporary discount. The new floor for global instability is higher than the old ceiling. Build portfolios that benefit from it rather than fighting it.

Rule #3: Power politics has replaced polite diplomacy. Iran’s civilian casualties are tragic and real. But the uncomfortable truth is that the international system still runs on power, not principle. U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer publicly said he “does not believe in regime change from the skies.” Yet Britain allowed the United States to use its bases to conduct the strikes.

What nations say and what they ultimately do are often very different things. Investors need to focus on the latter.

The Bottom Line

Venezuela. Greenland. Cuba. Iran. Four major foreign policy actions in eight weeks, each one more audacious than the last. Each one driven by the same underlying logic: the U.S. is done managing the world. It is now acquiring it.

The Imperium Americanum isn’t a prediction anymore – it is a description of current events. 

The U.S. has struck Iran’s supreme leader, threatened to seize an Arctic island from a NATO ally, strangled a Caribbean government, and taken possession of South American oil reserves – all before March. And there are still nine months left in this rapid escalation of geopolitical ambition.

Yet, even as the geopolitical order shifts, another regime change may be forming in financial markets.

For the past decade, investors were told one simple rule: own the Magnificent 7 and ride the AI boom.

But Eric Fry believes that rule is about to break – suddenly and violently.

According to Eric’s research, beginning April 24, a wave of earnings reports from Microsoft, Apple, Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon could expose a structural flaw in the AI boom that almost no one on Wall Street is talking about.

If he’s right, the result could be a massive market regime change – one that sends trillions of dollars rushing out of the hyperscalers and into a completely different class of companies.

Investors who stay concentrated in the Magnificent 7 could be caught holding the bag… much like investors who held Cisco, Intel, and the dot-com darlings after the tech bubble burst.

But Eric believes those who position themselves early could capture the next phase of the AI boom – in the companies supplying what he calls AI’s “Golden Rivets.”

These are the irreplaceable materials, power systems, and memory components required to build the AI economy – the physical inputs hyperscalers suddenly cannot scale fast enough.

In a special briefing on Wednesday, March 18, 2026 at 1:00 pm ET, Eric explains why he believes this shift could trigger a $10 trillion market shock – and why investors may have only a narrow window before the April 24 earnings cycle begins.

Reserve your seat for that presentation right here.