Good Luck Making It Home

I saw this on X this morning and I laughed out loud.

Matt Tardio — he posts as @angertab — laid the week out in four lines, and he is due the credit. I am not going to steal a joke and then act like I found it in a briefing book. If you did not see his post, here is the week, in English, for people who were busy with the groceries.

The United Nations is having its big annual meet and greet in New York. Leaders fly in, take a microphone in a hall we host, and tell the planet what they think of the planet. Iran's president, Masoud Pezeshkian, was on the list. His office says he leaves Tehran on Tuesday, and that he is scheduled to speak on Wednesday. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi is in the same traveling circus. This is normal UN weather. It happens every September. The only unusual part is who is paying for the fuel.

Because we host the building, the United States is expected to let the people who have to sit in that hall actually enter the country. That is the Headquarters Agreement, which is a lease with manners, not a coup. State said it out loud this time: host-country obligations. So the core Iranian delegation got visas. Pezeshkian. Araghchi. The names on the speaking order. Once they are here they do not get to wander. Travel limits. No little shopping spree on Fifth Avenue, which I admit I find funny in a petty way, and petty is allowed.

The media team did not get in. I will note that, because Tehran called it hostile and unprecedented, and also because a president who cannot bring his cameras is a president who has to borrow ours. That is not nothing. It is also not the punch line.

The punch line is the airplane.

On Monday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went on CNBC and described Wednesday — 23 September — as the day Iranian airlines are finished around the world. Not finished as in a strongly worded letter. Finished as in: if one of them lands, you do not give it fuel. You do not give it landing services. You do not sell it a ticket. If you do any of that, you get knocked out of the dollar system. Airports. Fuel trucks. The quiet little city that exists only to make a jet leave again. All of it.

That is not a ban on speeches. That is a ban on the hose.

Look at the calendar with me, because this is where Tardio started laughing and I joined him. Tuesday, the Iranian president says he is still coming. Wednesday, he is supposed to take the microphone in New York. Wednesday is also the day Bessent says the fuel truck becomes Treasury's problem. So we issued the visa. We did not issue the return ticket. He can arrive on a Tuesday airplane. What he cannot count on is a Wednesday airplane that anybody on earth is willing to fill.

The rest of the world is still trying to tell us what to do, Napoleon complexes en masse, from a building we heat and a river we police. Fine. They can have the microphone. They cannot have the hose. There is a certain kind of capital that thinks a slot on the speaking order is the same thing as command of American fuel. It is not. It has never been. The microphone is a courtesy. Jet-A is a market, and this week the market has a date on it.

I keep seeing people talk as if the UN runs JFK. It does not. It runs a speaking order. The Headquarters Agreement gets a delegation into the room. It does not make a refinery in another country sell jet fuel to a sanctioned airline and then pretend the dollar is a courtesy. That was never in the lease.

Someone is already saying he can hop to Mexico and find a quiet place on the border. Oh. No. Guess not. The hose is not a New York hose. Bessent did not say JFK. He said the world. Mexico City has fuel trucks. Those fuel trucks still like dollars. Then what? A bus to Canada? Sweetheart. Pearson is not a loophole. Greyhound is not a foreign policy. Ottawa has spent the year practicing how to be a third door. It is not going to be the third door for an Iranian airliner on a Wednesday when the dollar is the lock.

So he can have the speech. He can have the hall. He can have the cameras we did not let him bring. What he cannot have is a full tank and a straight face about who is in charge of it.

Tardio's closer is the right closer, so I will not improve it.

Good luck making it home.

— Caroline North