Persian Gulf Tensions: Is Spontaneous Combustion Imminent Amid US-Iran Standoff?

We are today at the end of the Chinese New Year week when bullion markets in Shanghai and Hong Kong were shut? Despite that both silver and gold have turned very bullish. What is the reason?

After the failure of politics and diplomacy when war starts turning into a macabre reality, there comes a moment when the number of moving pieces becomes so large, so fast, and so interconnected, that the crisis spontaneously combusts. Has that inflexion point been reached in the Persian Gulf?

What remains on the trust ledger between the US and Iran is essentially zero. And zero trust in a confrontation that is heavily armed with many moving military pieces and many stated red lines is the condition under which wars begin by accident as easily as by intention. In a confrontation this close to ignition, uncertainty doesn't create caution. It creates pressure to act before the other side does. To strike first rather than absorb a first strike, to interpret ambiguity as hostile intent and respond accordingly. These thoughts occupy the minds of the warriors.

A F4 Phantom II of the Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force (IRIAF) crashed during a night training mission in Hamadan province on 19 February, last Thursday. The aircraft belonged to the 31st Tactical Fighter Squadron and took off from Shaheed Nojeh Air Base for routine exercises before the incident occurred. Brigadier General Mehdi Firouzmand, a flight instructor of the combat crew training squadron, died in the crash. Nojeh Air Base is also one of the facilities that American strike planners have on their target list.

Simultaneously, what was happening in the air above the Persian Gulf at precisely the same time that this plane went down? The USS Gerald R. Ford, the largest aircraft carrier in the world, is rapidly sailing to the Middle East to back up the USS Abraham Lincoln, which is already in the Arabian Sea. Open-source ship tracking data shows the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and is now on a direct course toward the Arabian Sea. The world’s largest warship heading straight toward Iran's southern coast, arriving at exactly the moment an Iranian fighter jet fell out of the sky without explanation during a routine training mission. Coincidence or communication?

Here is the technical reality that makes this incident so difficult to dismiss as pure accident. The F4 Phantom, despite Iran's resourcefulness in maintaining pre-revolution American hardware amid prolonged isolation from Western suppliers, faces ongoing challenges. Sanctions have severely limited access to original spare parts, forcing Iranian engineers to rely on reverse engineering and domestic modifications. Nighttime flights add complexity, requiring precise instrumentation and heightened vigilance, particularly for an aircraft lacking modern avionics upgrades. Every one of those vulnerabilities, aging electronics, reverse engineered components, degraded navigation systems, is also a vulnerability that sophisticated electronic warfare can exploit.  The US can easily confuse virtually all IRIAF aircraft and drones by GPS jamming, navigation spoofing, electronic interference that causes avionics to report false altitude, false air speed, and false orientation. A pilot following instruments that are lying to him will fly a perfectly functional aircraft into the ground and never know why until the moment of impact.

As of recent assessments in 2025 and into 2026, the IRIAF maintains approximately 60 to 63 F4 Phantoms in service, though operational readiness varies. Sixty F4 Phantoms built in the 1960s and 1970s flying on reverse engineered spare parts against an American air campaign that will deploy F-35 stealth fighters, F-22 Raptors, B2 stealth bombers, and over 200 total aircraft, all equipped with fifth generation avionics, active electronically scanned array radars, and electronic warfare systems that can reach out and blind an F4's instruments from hundreds of miles away without firing a single missile.

The Nojeh airbase sits in Hamadan Province, far enough from the Gulf Coast that it represents Iran's ability to project air power into central and western theatres, including toward Israel. If American jamming was active in that airspace when the F4 went down, then the IRIAF learnt something critical about its own vulnerabilities before the war formally begins. And if Iranian commanders understand that American electronic warfare can reach 1,500 km into their territory during peacetime conditions, that it can interfere with navigation systems over Hamadan while American carriers are still approaching from the Mediterranean, then the opening minutes of any formal conflict will be far more electronically hostile than anything Iran and its Chinese supporters has prepared for.

The F4 may have crashed because of mechanical failure. It may have crashed because of Iranian pilot error during a demanding nighttime exercise. It may have crashed because of electronic warfare from an American system that reached 1,500 km into Iranian airspace to prove a point. Iranian investigators don't know as yet. And that uncertainty, that same uncertainty that defines every element of this crisis, is the most dangerous thing of all.

Buried inside this story is a detail that almost nobody is connecting to the main narrative. And it may perhaps be the most consequential piece of information to emerge of late. Speaking with Tucker Carlson on Friday 20 February, Mike Huckabee, the US Ambassador to Israel, when pressed about the geographical borders of Israel, argued that they are rooted in Old Testament scripture. Huckabee told Carlson that the biblical verse that promised land to the descendants of Abraham refers to an area between the Euphrates River in Iraq and the Nile River in Egypt. Such a stretch of territory would encompass modern-day Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Jordan and parts of Saudi Arabia. Huckabee tersely stated that he would have no problems if the Israeli’s took it all. The official diplomatic representative of the United States government to the state of Israel, a Senate confirmed ambassador, just said publicly that he supports Israeli territorial expansion across the broader Middle East. Not the West Bank, not Gaza, the broader Middle East.

Though Huckabee later denied it, the fact is that this was not an off-the-cuff remark. Ambassadors do not freelance on territorial policy. Every word that comes out of a US ambassador's mouth is reviewed, approved, and represents at minimum the tolerance of the administration that appointed him. Huckabee was appointed by Donald Trump and Trump's administration has in the same week confirmed that its strike planning includes scenarios aimed at regime change across Iran, meaning the physical removal of the government of the largest country in the region by population, military capability, and strategic influence.

Regime change plus the US Ambassador endorsing greater Israel in the same week during Ramzan, while two carrier strike groups converge on Iranian waters, while an Iranian fighter jet lies burning in a Hamadan field, is not coincidence. It is a policy posture becoming visible in real time. Iran's foreign minister Abbas Araghchi addressed it on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” show hosted by Joe Scarborough. Araghchi stated that there was no military solution to Iran's nuclear program. This path has been tried before. Major attacks were carried out on our facilities. Iran has the technology and it cannot be destroyed by bombing or military action.

This is the core strategic argument that 90% of Trump's own advisers have been privately making since this crisis began. You can destroy buildings. You can kill scientists. You cannot destroy knowledge. You cannot bomb an idea out of existence. Iran's nuclear enrichment knowledge exists inside the minds of hundreds of engineers, physicists, and technicians across the country, and eliminating that knowledge would require eliminating every person who holds it, which is a category of action that has a name, and that name is not limited strike.

US lawmakers have filed a formal resolution demanding Trump seek congressional approval before any strike on Iran. The countdown is ticking towards some level of military operations. And even as US officials claim diplomacy is still happening, it appears the Pentagon is taking drastic actions and precautions. Congressional Democrats and a growing number of Republicans are saying publicly that the US Constitution requires a declaration of war from the US Congress, not a presidential executive order, before US forces attack a country that has not attacked the US first. Trump's legal position for bypassing the US Congress has been significantly weakened by the US Supreme Court ruling that stripped him of his IEPA emergency powers for tariffs. The same legal doctrine he relied on for tariffs, that the president can declare an economic emergency and act unilaterally, is the legal doctrine his lawyers were planning to use to justify strikes on Iran without congressional authorization. The US Supreme Court declared that doctrine has limits and the US Congress is now formally on record saying come to us first.

Trump is flanked from the right by Netanyahu pushing for maximum action immediately; from the left by congressional Democrats invoking the War Powers Act. From above by a Supreme Court that just limited his emergency powers. From across the Atlantic by Britain refusing its bases. From across the Arab world by Gulf states refusing their airspace. From across the Pacific by China feeding Iranian commanders real time satellite intelligence. And from the north by Russian TU 95 bombers that appeared near the Alaskan Air Defence Identification Zone on 20 February, as a reminder that the US is not fighting a one-front confrontation.

And yet through all of it, Trump said he was considering a limited military strike on Iran to pressure Tehran into accepting a nuclear deal on his terms. The word “considering” is doing extraordinary amounts of work right now because on one side of that consideration is a nuclear deal shortly to be presented on paper by Iran, while on the other side is a military strike that US forces are on standby to execute. That would trigger immediate Iranian retaliation against the US Al-Udeid air base in Qatar. That would send oil to US $90 per barrel or beyond. That would close the Strait of Hormuz. That would activate the Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah in Lebanon simultaneously. And that America would be fighting, in the words of the Pentagon, for significantly longer than 12 days without Britain's bases, without Arab airspace approval, and with Russian intelligence feeding Iranian missile batteries targeting coordinates of every American ship in the Gulf in real time.

The US non-essential troop evacuations from its bases in Qatar and Bahrain are not a signal of retreat. They are the final pre-combat repositioning. The people who left are not going home. They're getting out of the kill zone before the shooting starts. The people who stayed know what that means. The soldiers remaining at Al-Udeid right now, watching their compatriots board transport planes, know exactly what assessment drove those evacuation orders.

Uncertainty is compounding by the hour and spontaneous combustion can manifest anytime.