Episode Details

Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.

5️⃣ Vance Off The Plane, China On The Board

Vice President JD Vance didn’t even bother traveling Islamabad for talks on Iran, trump claimed it was for security concerns but no Iranian delegation had left for Pakistan. On CNBC’s Squawk Box, Trump described intercepting an Iranian vessel carrying “things on it, which wasn’t very nice,” calling the cargo “a gift from China, perhaps” — the first time a sitting U.S. president has described Beijing rearming Tehran’s air defenses. Former Iranian negotiator Mohammad Marandi posted a public warning telling Iranians to leave the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait immediately, and said ships near the Strait of Hormuz should prepare to abandon. A direct threat to US vessels who have been blockading Iranian ports. Iran’s parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said Tehran has “new cards on the battlefield,” language Blundell read as confirmation of the Chinese systems. A Daily Mirror report said Trump asked Joint Chiefs chair Dan Caine for a full ground invasion of Iran and the nuclear codes over the weekend, and that Caine walked out of the meeting. The ceasefire ends tomorrow night.

4️⃣ Ukraines Counter-Offensive

Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced Tuesday that the Druzhba pipeline, the Soviet-era crude artery Ukrainian drones knocked offline in January, is repaired and ready to resume. The restart unlocks the €90 billion EU loan that Budapest had been blocking and releases the next Russia sanctions package Hungary had vetoed. Overnight, Special Operations Centre Alpha of the Security Service of Ukraine hit the Samara line dispatch station — the mixing point where high- and low-sulfur crude becomes the Urals export blend — cutting Russian production by as much as 40 percent. In the same window, Peter Magyar won Hungary’s election on a platform of forcing Viktor Orbán out and redistributing Orbán’s captured media licenses. Ukraine now runs 85 percent self-sufficient on munitions and air defense and has signed production deals with the same Gulf states that stopped buying drones from the Trump crime family. Two levers on one pipeline of money: Washington squeezes Iran’s barrels off the market and lifts Russia’s ledger; Kyiv cuts the ledger at Samara and drops Budapest’s veto.

3️⃣ Palantir Puts It In Writing

Palantir Technologies posted a 22-point manifesto to X over the weekend — billed as a summary of CEO Alex Karp’s 2025 book The Technological Republic, co-authored with head of corporate and legal affairs Nicholas Zamiska. The planks include “hard power in this century will be built on software,” a call for universal national service and an end to the all-volunteer force, a claim that “the question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose,” a line that “the post-war neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone,” and the assertion that “some cultures have produced vital advances. Others remain dysfunctional and regressive.” Blundell’s piece, which went viral within hours of publication, called Palantir the first private corporation in recorded history to fuse four powers civilizations had kept apart: the surveillance apparatus of the state, the targeting engine of the military, the ideological machinery that decides what information travels, and the patronage of Jeffrey Epstein — who put $40 million into the company and corresponded with Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, and Elon Musk for five years after his conviction. Blundell called it “the digital East India Trading Company,” the private corporate army that ran sovereign states for 150 years until the Crown absorbed it into the Royal Navy. The current Vice President is funded by Thiel; the man behind the manifesto is Karp.

Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by