The Techstack of 'Democracy'

Will AI development now effectively be capped by national security concerns? Has the government decided publicly available (and privately run) AI has gone far enough? What does that mean for stocks?

Saturday, February 28th, 2026

Scottsdale, Arizona

By Dan Denning

Greetings from the scorched earth of the Arizona desert. I went to bed last night with the intention of adding a note or two to my weekly research brief. And then you wake up and another war has broken out in the Middle East. Let’s begin with that…and then move on to the Trade of the Decade, tokenized gold, then AI, and finally the Mountain Mormons versus the Amish.

So far–and it’s early days–the Israeli/US combat operations in Iran look like a leadership decapitation strike. That may change. But major oil infrastructure does not appear to be a target. Iran lobbed ballistic missiles at six sites in the region. But it does not appear, at least yet, to have escalated into a sustained aerial campaign from the US. And thank goodness it has not gone nuclear.

This is not 1991 or 2003. The US does not have the munitions to sustain a three-week aerial campaign against Iran. It may not need them, if the goal is the leadership of the Revolutionary Guards and key figures in the regime. And in any case, it may be enough to interrupt (or eventually halt) the flow of Iranian oil to China. Between the Venezuelan regime change and this action in Iran, it appears the US is choking off China’s supply of oil. And what about oil?

The Trump Administration has added about 20 million barrels of oil to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) from the 40-year low at 346 million barrels. It’s limited to how much it can add by Congressional funding to refill what was run down during the Biden years. Still, a 20% increase gives the US a bit more margin for error in riding out any disruption to global oil flows if Iran is able to disrupt tanker traffic in the Strait of Hormuz.