Pod Save the World - Trump Goes from Obliteration to Negotiation on Iran

Episode Date: March 25, 2026

In the past few days, Donald Trump went from threatening to obliterate Iran's power plants to announcing a surprise diplomatic reprieve and declaring that the war has been won. This episode breaks down the whiplash: what actually happened, whether the talks are real, why an agreement between the US and Iran will be extraordinarily hard to reach, and why $580 million worth of energy trades just minutes before Trump's announcement reek of insider trading and corruption. Ben and Tommy also cover: the US allowing Iran to sell $14 billion worth of oil, Iran firing missiles at a joint US-UK military base, Israel's creeping occupation of southern Lebanon, signs that Trump is actually harming far-right parties in Europe, and how a workout app put a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier at risk. Then Tommy talks with Edward Fishman, the author of Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare, about the ballooning economic cost of war with Iran and how it’s revealing America’s economic vulnerabilities.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.Preorder Ben’s book All We Say: The Battle for American Identity: A History in 15 Speeches (Barnes & Noble, Bookshop) and subscribe to his Substack here.

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working for China's Ministry of State Security, one of the most mysterious intelligence agencies in the world. The Sixth Bureau podcast is a story of the inner workings of the MSS and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its fault of secrets. Listen to the Sixth Bureau on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to Pod Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, today we wanted to debut a new segment with you called Great Moments in Oval Office history. Here's today's entrance from President Trump. Let's watch. Who knows better about surprise than Japan?

Okay? Why didn't you tell me about Pearl Harbor? Okay? Right? Right? Right? Oh. Is that, is, is World War II a sensitive subject in Japan?

I cannot think of a more cringe moment. And who are the, you know, people guffawing at first? And then when he actually dropped the Pearl Harbor reference, like he, he couldn't even just be settled. Who knows more about secrecy? in Japan. There's a, someone like groaned, it spoke for all of us, I think. I, I'll be honest, I watched that and I laughed out loud. I was like, that is just genuinely. Well, because he's just, it's such a, of course he did that. Of course he did that, you know. Takiichi was like,

she like literally gas, she's like, her eyes look like they're going to pop out of her head. It is wild. Anyway, that was, yeah, a real winner from our president. You know, just kind of like pinballing through the world, just kind of thrown his elbows at everybody. Even like she's his ally. One year and three months into it, Tommy, of the second term. Not. But yeah, like, she later in the day, too, had this bizarre thing where she, did you see where she said that Baron Trump was really good looking and he clearly got that from Donald?

What? Yeah, it's a little creepy. That's weird. Yeah. I mean, it's so funny because all the reporting on her trip was like great success because she avoided a blow up. It's like, what? I feel like the relationship should be about a little more than that.

It's a higher bar. Whatever. Whatever. What are you going to do? By the way, Ben and I did a bonus episode last Friday for the Ponce of the World YouTube where we dug it to the first three weeks of the war with Iran. So please subscribe to Pote of the World on YouTube. If you want more bonus episodes like that, it's also the venue where we find the dumbest clips we possibly can of Pete Hegseth or Trump or whatever.

And we laugh at them so that we don't cry because otherwise we do a lot of crying. So when you subscribe to Pod Save the World on YouTube, when you rate it, when you review it, when you shared the episodes, it really helps us grow the show. It helps us get good factual information into the YouTube algorithm and displace the pro-war propaganda from Fox News in the Daily Wire. Speaking of which, Ben, if you are sick of that shit in the credulous coverage of this war and you want to hear it discussed by people who are not in a coma for the last 20 years who were remembered the Iraq War and that it didn't go so well, please consider joining Crooked Media's friend of the pod subscription community. it is the number one thing you could do to help us grow as a company. You can sign up at crooked.com slash friends or right here on YouTube by pressing the join button. But our solemn pledge to you is it will never book Senator Lindsay Graham on the show unless he passes a breathalyzer test first. Does that work for you?

That works for me, Tommy. Or do we want him drunk? Do we want him to fail or pass? We maybe just want him passed out. Just silence. Ducatistate. Okay. Yeah.

I have a quick plug here. So listeners may know my book, Always Say, The Battle for American Identity is out in late May, available for pre-order now. And for Wednesday and Thursday, the 25th and 26th, there is a special discount for pre-orders on Barnes & Noble. Nice.

And if you're Barnes & Noble member, which you may be, if you listen to this podcast, you get 25% off. I think everybody else gets 10% off. So check it out. Hell yeah. Also, Ben Rhodes on Substact, notes on the stories we tell. Okay, enough plugs. Subscribe to all that shit. We're going to talk

today. We're going to try to explain Trump's crazy 180-degree turn on Iran policy in the span of the last 48 hours. So he went from promising basically a series of war crime air strikes on energy infrastructure to saying talks with Iran were so far along that the war was effectively over. We'll try to explain what happened, why it happened. And then we're going to dig into the details of the U.S. and Iranian demands and why getting a deal done feels quite difficult right now. We'll also cover what other countries in the Gulf are reportedly telling Trump some recent U.S. troop deployments that seem ominous but important to watch. Then we're going to explain why Iran firing a missile at a joint U.S.-UK. base raised a lot of eyebrows.

We'll talk about the growing cost of war and then update on the conflict in Lebanon. Then we're going to look at some recent elections in Europe and explain what they tell you about the strength of far right parties in Europe and how Trump might be impacting those parties. Spoiler alert, not well. And then finally, there's a little fun story at the end about how a fitness app exposed the location of a nuclear powered aircraft carrier in the middle of the war. Fun is always in air quotes on this show. And then you're going to hear my conversation with Edward Fishman, author of choke points, American power, and the age of economic warfare. Then we get into all the economic costs of the war, the ways it has exposed economic vulnerabilities, as he calls them choke points.

It's very up your alley in this conversation. Yeah, underappreciated piece of how Trump is messing up things. So I'm excited to hear that. Yeah, just exposing our enormous weaknesses to the entire world. All right. So let's try to understand the last 48 hours. So it has been truly headspinning on Saturday Trump posted, quote, If Iran doesn't fully open without threat the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours from this exact point in time,

the United States of America will hit and obliterate their various power plants, starting with the biggest one first. So again, that would be a war crime, but details, details. So this went over about as well as you'd expect in Iran, the Speaker of Iran's Parliament, Mohamed Bouquhar, Ghalibov responded with, quote, immediately after our country's electricity and infrastructure are struck,

we will consider vital infrastructure as well as energy and oil facilities throughout the region to be legitimate targets and will destroy them in an irreversible manner. So escalation ladder goes up and up. But then on Monday morning, just 12 hours before Trump's self-imposed deadline, Trump announced that Iran was getting a five-day reprieve from attacks on their power supply or oil infrastructure, power infrastructure, because the two sides were having very good

and productive conversations. Now, everyone, especially the Iranians, seem surprised by this claim. But our president elaborated on the talks and much more during press events on Monday and Tuesday. Here is some of what he said. They called. I didn't call. They called. They want to make a deal. We're in negotiations right now. J.D. is involved and Marco is involved and Jared Kushner's involved. Very smart guy. And Steve Whitkoff, smart guy, is involved. And I'm involved. We're dealing with the man who I believe is the most respected and the leader.

If it goes well, we're going to end up with settling this. Otherwise, we'll just keep bombing our little hearts out. They did something yesterday that was amazing, actually. They gave us a present. And the president arrived today. It was a very big present worth a tremendous amount of money. You know, this is a change in the regime because the leaders are all very different than the ones that we started off with

that created all those problems. So this was, I think we can say, Jason, this is regime change, right? We've won this war. This war has been won. What about the straight of war moves? Who's going to be in control? Maybe me. Maybe me.

Maybe me. Me and the Ayatollah, whoever the Ayatollah is. I said, Pete and General Raisin-Kane, I think this thing's going to be settled very soon. Here they go, oh, that's too bad. Pete didn't want it to be settled. We see ourselves as part of this negotiation as well. We negotiate with bombs. To give you a little bonus head at the end there because Trump is setting him up to be blamed for the whole thing.

So listeners are probably asking what happened. Ben, do you want to take first crack at it? You want me to take first crack at it? And then how do you want to go here? I mean, here's what I will tell you what I think happened, right? Which is Trump threatens to start hitting power plants, civilian and energy infrastructure. That's a war crime, we should just say. When Vladimir Putin does that, you know, we get very upset as we should.

Then I think over the weekend, people got to him. And there's been some reporting on this that the Gulf countries whose energy infrastructure would be destroyed by Iran if they made good on their threat to hit energy infrastructure. got to him. The markets got to him because he could see the price of oil skyrocketing. He could see futures. You could see the bond markets going in very dark direction. And so I think he was spooked. I don't think there was any negotiation whatsoever, the Iranians. The Iranians came out and denied it. It's a sad state of affairs that I believe the Iranians to be more credible than Trump. Now, I do think that there's probably a lot of frenetic diplomacy, and it's probably all intermediaries,

where Qatar, Oman, countries that are traditionally negotiators and are also being walloped economically and sometimes physically in this war are probably trying to go back and forth and get messages from the Americans and Iranians. But I don't think there's some evolved negotiation here. I think Trump climbed down because of the markets and because of what he was hearing from the Gulf. And but he had to somehow make it seem like he was about to get a deal. We can get into also the potential market manipulation that went on here. But that statement was for. for the markets. And his pullback was because people got to him finally and said this would be madness to continue up the energy escalation ladder at the precise time that the global economy

is being completely destroyed by this war in what's happening with respect to energy. I hear that and I hear a man who has no idea what's going on, who has no idea what he started. He can talk about J.D. and Marco and Jared and Steve and the gang. Those guys have no idea what the hell is going on. The IRGC, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, controls the straight-of-formoose, not even the Iranian government. The IRGC controls it. Their stuff is getting out. Other peoples is not. That is how bad this war is Donald Trump is losing this war. And only is he not won it, he is actively losing the war. And so he's just trying to kind of calm markets as if there's not a reality out there that, you know, is not going to bend to

whatever his fiction is. And like the end state he describes there as co-ownership with the Iranians of the straightover moves? With the Ayatolls? He's talking about the, the Supreme Leader's son who he was, you know, disparaging as homosexual and some bizarre theater in the New York Post the other day? Like, which I atoll is he talking about? Yeah, it's like they're talking about joint custody of Eric.

Like, yeah. A couple, my response, I saw him do this on Monday morning. I thought this is entirely market manipulation. Like this is about oil and stock markets. And he woke up any morning. Trump saw the European markets were way off. Asian stock markets were getting crushed. And he wanted to punt that ball down the road.

And so, you know, oh, lo and behold, he announces like a five-day reprieve, which is right until markets close on Friday. There are some, as you mentioned, like there's some talks are happening. A bunch of news outlets have reported that Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan met to try to find some sort of off ramp to end the war. the Egyptian intelligence kind of led the outreach to the Iran's IRGC. But apparently the new interlocutor on the Iranian side is the guy I mentioned earlier, Speaker Ghalibov, who Trump seems to think can be his new like Delci Rodriguez in Iran,

which means like in Venezuela, a leader that the U.S. can install and control. But that is a hell of a lot easier said than done in Iran. And again, of the talks, Ghalibov said, our people demand the complete and humiliating punishment of the aggressors. No negotiations with America have taken place. Fake news is intended to manipulate financial and oil markets and to escape the quagmire in which America and Israel are trapped. That doesn't sound all that hopeful. And again, like Iran is talking about hitting infrastructure like oil and gas, but also maybe desalination plants, which we've discussed before, like Kuwait gets 90% of its water from the sea. Saudi Arabia gets 70%. So that would be a huge crisis. And then just quickly on the

corruption thing. So the Financial Times reported that, traders made a half a billion dollars worth of bets in the oil markets 15 minutes before Trump's tweet announcing these talks. So a 6,200 Brent or WTI futures contracts, those are oil features, were bought and sold between 649 and 650 a.m. on Monday, 15 minutes before the truth social post. The notional value of the trade was $580 million. There was also a spike right at that time in the trading of S&P futures, and then maybe some sort of like European energy commodities too. I'm sure it was all just a coincidence, Ben, but someone made a lot of money. Yeah, and we saw this, by the way, before with the tariffs, when he did his climb down after

Liberation Day, there was a lot of suspicious trading before that that made a lot of people a lot of money. And again, like, we need to spell this out because this is very plain what is happening. Donald Trump knows if he goes out and says on true social, which is clearly a planned thing, right, it's not even like a kind of stand up in front of the microphones, you know, with the Air Force One blasting away. He knows he's going to post that a certain time. And he knows that that's going to bring down the price of world futures and calm markets. If somebody has foreknowledge of that and trades, they can make an extraordinary amount of of money. And again, either this is like the biggest coincidence in the world that someone had a

premonition that there was going to be a post just like this or somebody knew or got tipped off and did this. And I'm sorry, like, we don't know, I'm not suggesting I know for a fact what happened. I am saying this is incredibly suspicious. And I can't think of anything more disgusting than somebody profiting off a war. Trading off a war. Trading off a war because Donald Trump is like turning the dial on oil prices up and down with his, you know, false. claims about negotiations. I also say, like, to the markets, like, which we talk about, like, as if it's a person, not the best day for them, too, like, that they somehow are credulous of Donald Trump's claims, you know? I mean, I know people are eager for this to end, but just because

he puts something on too social doesn't mean it's true. Well, the Iranians, you know, it folds into this preexisting narrative, the taco thing, right? Trump always chickens out. And that works with tariffs and things he can turn on and off and controls. It doesn't. It doesn't. It doesn't work in the context of a war where Iran gets a shoot back, you know? So, Ben, before we dig into the substance of the negotiations themselves and why getting a deal will be really difficult, I did want to play you a clip from an expert that gave me some hope and some faith in President Trump's abilities. So this is an infamous parogi hater and friend of Jeffrey Epstein, Alan Dershowitz.

Let's watch. Had President Trump been in charge in 1935, 1936, I think the Holocaust would have been prevented. I think he would have gone in after Nazi Germany. He would have destroyed it the way he is destroying Nazi Iran. And the Holocaust would have been prevented. Spot the lie. I mean, Alan Dershowitz's capacity, I know it's newsmax, but to get himself on television is pretty remarkable to me.

I mean, all these Trump supporters, they can't even really, like, defend what's happening. They can't even give a plausible argument for why this. was a good idea. So it's all this kind of insanity. Like, well, he would have, but, you know, next thing, he would have, like, prevented the civil war in this country. Like, this is, we are just living with the stupidest people in the world, blowing smoke up this guy's ass when he, the emperor has been revealed before the entire world to have no clothes, you know. I should also add, as a negotiating strategy, I just want to say, to embrace the Speaker of the Iranian Parliament. If you think, that's a good way to get that guy

killed, either by the Israelis who seemed to want to kill anybody that could bring an end to this war, as they did with Ali Larajani, or by the Iranians themselves, the IRGC is not going to go along with the Delci Rodriguez plan. They're just not. Like, that is not an option here. Maybe there's some cold peace that can be arrived at, and we can talk about that. But the idea that this Delci Rodriguez play is going to work in Iran, what have you been, what planet have you been on the last four weeks that you think that's possible? Yeah. Podzae the world is brought to you by Helix. Helix is the most awarded mattress brand.

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Ben. So here's why getting a deal done will be very hard. So first of all, Iran doesn't trust the United States, and that's clear, right? The Trump pulled out of the JCPOA when Iran was complying with it back in 2018. Last June, the White House was bragging about using talks with Iran as like subterfuge to help the Israelis plan their bombing raid. Remember that whole thing? And then in this most recent bombing raid, the U.S. and before this most recent conflict, the U.S. and Iran came out of those talks saying like these were the most productive sessions yet. And then again, the U.S. and Israel started bombing. So they don't trust us, to say the least. Second, Iran now thinks it has a lot of leverage, right? Like the Iranians decided that they screwed up

before by being measured in response to the 12-day war or U.S. bombing rates or whatever. Now they've decided and seen that they can fire missiles everywhere cause regional chaos and like truly global economic damage. And that gives them a lot of leverage. And then third, I think Iran knows that if they reach just a temporary ceasefire, there's a good chance the U.S. in Israel are bombing them again in six months, 12 months, 18 months, right? So they want a long-term resolution. And so their list of demands is going to be extensive. Some of it has been been floated in the press. I don't know how much of this is positioning or people who know what they're talking about versus don't, but just to summarize what I've seen, I've seen them call for

simultaneous ceasefires in Iran, Lebanon and Iraq, the U.S. closing its military bases in the region, reparations for damage done during the war, sanctions relief, recognition of Iran's right to enrich nuclear materials, recognition of their right to develop nuclear ballistic missiles. Iran wants to treat the Strait of Hormuz like a toll road and the charge ships that go through it a fee. So all of those are going to be non-starters for Trump, for Gulf countries, for the Israelis, et cetera. And then you're also seeing like crown prints that all these reports now that the Saudis are saying to Trump finish the job, decapitate the regime. There's also reports the UAE is making the same case and even considering getting directly involved in the fighting. And at the same time,

Ben, Trump doesn't seem to have moved an inch on all of his demands, right? And so like to your point about the markets being stupid, that to me kind of, gives up the whole game. Because what are the Iranians going to agree to now in this sort of like maximalist set of U.S. and Israeli demands that they didn't agree to before now that they feel like they have real leverage? What am I missing here? I agree with everything you said.

And what I would add to it is we've made this point that the Iranian response, because of what you said, right, because of the feeling that they did not hit back hard enough in the 12-day were that that invited this kind of existential resolution. change war on them by the U.S. and Israel, they have a clear theory of the case that they need to make this war so painful for the United States and the global economy that the United States won't do it again. And Israel is a different story because they have their own fixation on regime change. But everything the Iranians have done has suggested that this war has made the Iranian regime much more radical, like much more Doug.

in because that's their only path to survival. They see diplomacy with Trump as something that they can't trust because they've been bombed twice during diplomacy. So they need to achieve their objectives in part through the war. The cost has to be prohibitive to the United States and global economy. We'll see if they can do that. Thus far, they're demonstrating that they can. And we'll see if they can hang on. And so to that end, anything, they may not want that whole list, right? Reparations and all that rest. But whatever the end state is that they agree to probably has to be something that gives them the maximum assurance that they're not going to be bombed again. So things like actual sanctions relief, right? The sanctions are gone. Like, that would be a

signal from the United States that this kind of conflict between the U.S. and Iran is over. Yeah. Like, you're back in the global economy. Like security arrangements maybe between Iran and the Gulf may have to be negotiated. So anything that the Iranians agree to is going to have to be in that kind of space. The U.S. doesn't even really know what it's prioritizing here. If they won a nuclear deal, they can get one. There was one on the table before this war. As long as the Iranians can say they sell a nuclear program, they're just not going to pursue a weapon. By the way, that was the Iran nuclear deal under Obama. That's something Trump could get. But that's about it. I don't really know. Iranians don't seem to concede. So he may have to talk about taco. Like he may have to accept

a much more radical government in some ways more empowered because they've shown what they can do. and make concessions to them for the kind of same nuclear deal he could have had without launching this war in the first place. It's crazy. Yeah, it's crazy. I was talking to someone who an Iran expert today who has been involved in what are called like track two negotiations. Those are like conversations with people who have ties to the Iranian government but aren't a part of government but are like kind of clued in enough that you can float diplomatic possibilities. Right. And this person said that like the Europeans seemed really. excited about the talks, but the Iranian officials, this person talked to, were dug in and way more so than usual. This person also said that the Gulf countries, like the stuff you're seeing reported about some of the various Gulf countries, like the UAE saying,

finish the job. That is 100% true. They are pissed and they are angry. Yeah, yeah, no, I wanted to say one thing about that. The UAE in particular, if you look at the straight-of-Hormuz, right? What you see is, or, you know, are these kind of small countries like the UAE and Qatar, they're the ones that just cannot get their energy, the oil and gas out without the straight being opened. And so the reason why I think it may be true that the UAE wants this, you know, finished,

or in some fashion, is they know that if it stops now, the IRGC runs the straight-for moves like a toll road. And so whether they wanted the war or not, like they need the straight opened, and they don't trust that the IRC is going to like let their stop. stuff through. Saudis, I'm still, like, well, maybe that's true. Maybe it's not, because the Saudis have a lot to lose if this war goes on. But that definitely strikes me is true. But I think they don't even know what does it mean for the war to end. And it's probably a version of a frozen

conflict. You know, this war is not unlike the war in Ukraine, right? The U.S. thought it would be cakewalk, the U.S. thought that the regime would collapse. And the first blitzkrieg happened, and it didn't. Yeah. And Pete Hackseth can, like, talk all he wants about bombs. Bombing gets less effective, not more. I mean, we've hit a lot of these targets. They know that they can weather it.

And so then the question becomes, does this kind of just continue until it kind of freezes in place at some point? And you deal with bits and pieces of this, like the Strait of Hormuz. Or does the U.S. put boots on the ground and really try to destroy the regime, which could lead to an implosion of Iran? Let's get to the boots thing in a second. So this person who is involved in these track two negotiations also pointed out that like Ghalybath actually is a credible messenger and someone who you could maybe do business with. But Trump is probably kneecapping the guy by talking about him all the time, right? Like it's just it seems like the worst strategy.

A lot of folks I've talked to did take a little hope or see a little hope in the fact that there's reports that J.D. Vance might get involved in the talks. It would be a good thing because, first of all, I would take it out of the hands of like, you know, Jared Kushner and Steve Wickoff who have proven themselves to be bumbling fucking idiots. But also, you know, J.D. Vance would probably only get involved if it was ready to get over the finish line and seems like someone who at least has told us in the past

that he's, you know, wouldn't want this war to be over. But it doesn't seem like he's really involved yet. You know, you heard that quote from Trump a minute ago where he's like, JD's involved, I'm involved, Marco's involved, right? So that he's just like, name and everybody. while blaming Pete for the war happening. And then, Ben, again, like, this person said the best case scenario might be an outcome

where, like, Trump essentially has to bribe Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and get us back to the status quo ante before the war. Exactly. We basically saw that process start last week when the U.S. let Iran make about $14 billion by selling 140 million barrels of Iranian oil. So real quick, here's a clip of Treasury Secretary Scott Besson from over the weekend on Meet the Press. talking about this decision. And then I want to get your reaction to it

because this is a touchy subject in Obama world. Let's watch. Is the president in the process of winding down this war or escalating the conflict? Again, they're not mutually exclusive. Sometimes you have to escalate to de-escalate. On Friday, the Treasury Department lifted sanctions on Iranian oil stored on tankers. A move that would effectively allow Iran to get more than $14 billion of oil revenue. Why is the U.S. helping to fund a country that it's currently at war with, Mr. Secretary?

Again, Kristen, why don't we have good facts here? That Iranian oil was always going to be sold to the Chinese. It was going to be sold at a discount. So which is better, Kristen, which is better if they were, if oil prices spiked to $150 and they were getting 70% of that or oil prices below 100, it's better to have them where they are now. And to be clear, we had always planned for this contingency. About 140 million barrels are out on the water. In essence, we are jujitsuing the Iranians. We're using their own oil against them. It's a jujitsu move to let the Iranians make billions of dollars to help them fund a war that they're fighting against you. By the way, speaking of jiu-jitsu in planning then, I read, I can't remember where maybe the

Times of the Journal over the weekend, that the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the U.S. one, was only 60% full at the start of this war. So clearly, no one had done any planning for this thing. What do you make of that decision to relieve sanctions on Iran during a war with Iran? I've been practicing mindfulness, Tommy. How's it going? I don't know if you knew this about me. I got some of those meditation apps. You're listening to Ezra too much. I've done some hot yoga, just so people know, because I'm just trying to get more in touch. with my body. And so I'm going to incorporate these practices now.

But I'm going to do a little history here. The first piece of history is that in the Obama administration, you may recall that as part of the Iran nuclear deal coming into effect and also a prisoner release from Iran, including our friend Jason Rezine, that the United States allowed Iran to receive 400 million dollars that they were owed. And it's a long story that had to do with the fact that the Iranians paid for some weapons back when the Shah was there. The weapons were never delivered. A court decided to go the money. Yes, exactly. Anyway, they got $400 million. And the MAGA world and the APAC world and all the BB lovers out there online have spent

10 years. I cannot post something online without somebody posting. a meme about like pallets of cash because some of the 400 million was delivered in pallets of cash. Now, you can argue about whether or not you like that deal or not, but the reality was it was $400 million of money that Iran was owed under international law. This is $14 billion. This is like, I mean, I'm not a math expert. This is like leaps and bounds more than the 400 million. It is in the middle of a war.

It is being given to the Iranians because. of the rank incompetence of the Trump administration and launching a war that they clearly thought was going to be a cakewalk and running into a buzzsaw instead, even though everybody could have predicted this. All of the people that spent 10 years like clutching their pearls about the $400 million in pallets of cash, I guarantee you every single one of those fucking people, support this idiocy, support this war, will not trash Trump for giving around $14 billion, dollars, literal tankers full of cash. And Scott Besson has had this, you know, sticky poles where he's the grown up and the smart one who talks to the quote unquote markets.

He has no, you can listen to him there. He doesn't even know what he's talking about. And when he talks about how we've been planning for this, we've been playing. So, okay, two things could be true here. One is that these people are so incompetent that the only way they can bring world prices down is to let the Iranians make $14 billion as a starter. Who knows where it's going to go from there? Never mind that the Russian, are out, also out from under sanctions. But let's, like, the good scenario, the Besson says is that they actually planned this all long, that it was part of the war plan.

Yeah, like, what was the mean? Yeah. He gets pissy about it. He's like this like, he gets pissy. Pissy cadaver on TV, like getting all mad at Kristen Welker asking basic normal questions. Well, it's, it's, because if they planned for it, you're telling me that you knew the war was going to go so bad that you're going to have to start waiving sanctions on the Iranians in the middle of it. So it's either the dumbest fucking plan ever or the dumbest,

fucking wherever, okay? And there's not another option here. Yeah, no, there is not. Sorry, got the pallets of cash off my chest. Hey, that's why I brought it up, brother. Also, the hoot you still haven't come into this conflict yet, so things get worse. One thing we're really watching closely, Ben, is it's just worth noting that a bunch of U.S. ships in Marines are heading to the Middle East, and some will be there by Friday when this sort of five-day pause ends. Right now, you know, like the USS Tripoli, it's an amphibious assault ship, is on its way from, I think, Asia with 2,200 Marines. There's a similar ship called the USS Boxer

that's en route from San Diego with another 2,200 Marines. I just saw reports that the Pentagon has ordered members of the 82nd Airborne, the immediate response force to deploy to the Middle East. That's a reaction force, about 3,000 troops who could be basically anywhere they need to be in 18 hours.

So these amphibious assault ships, they are like aircraft carriers, but not aircraft carriers in that they don't have catapults to launch planes off, but the harrier style jets can take off from them, the F-35Bs that can do the vertical take-off and landing, and then major helicopters like Ospreys work off of them.

And more importantly, though, they have a lower deck where you can launch ships, assault ships. So like if you wanted to send a bunch of Marines at Carg Island, for example, you would probably use an amphibious assault ship like the USS Boxer or the Tripoli. So it's all the way of saying there's just a lot of military assets, steaming to a location. And in the past year or so, when that has happened, Donald Trump has used those military assets to further a war. Yeah, we said on this podcast for months, pay attention to the military force gathered off the coast of Venezuela. It was going to be used. And this, as eerie reminders,

too, of the run up to the war in Iran, because while Trump was saying you wanted a deal, they were building up this massive, you know, armada to strike Iran, the largest massing of military force in the Middle since Iraq war. Now, whatever Trump is saying about, you know, we're negotiating and it looks great and the Iranians are calling me, there is a methodical deployment that is going forward that could only have the purpose of supporting a ground operation in Iran. Now, whether that's to seize nuclear materials at Isfahan in central Iran, whether that's to try to seize Karg Island as some kind of leverage on the Iranians, we don't know. What we do know is that's what these troops do. And that's what this hardware does. And so that's very disconcerting. And one of the

thing I want to say is that I don't get the sense, do you get the sense something that he's listening to any Iran experts? No. All he ever, you know, he doesn't seem to understand the men. Heggsath, Ruby O, Wickoff. And the reason this matters is that the mentality Iranians is they're going to fight. You take Cargoyle, they'll keep fight. They're not going to surrender. Like, it's like Afghanistan. It's like what, you know, what we dealt with in Iraq. Like, these are people that, are pissed, you know, if they were chending death to America before we bombed their country and killed thousands of them. Can you imagine what their mentality is now? And so the idea that one lightning special operation, like a Hollywood thing that Trump likes is going to solve this problem,

it's not. I hope, I really hope this doesn't go forward. Or if, yeah, like early on Trump was talking about regime change. There's a bunch of reporting over the weekend in the times that the Israelis and the Mossad had basically sold Trump on this idea that they could foment regime change or maybe use the Kurds to begin a regime change operation. Obviously, that didn't happen. But yeah, to your point, I mean, now I think 1,500 people are dead in Iran. We bombed a girls' school. Trump is threatening to blow up their power plants.

Like, that is not going to lead to an uprising in a way that's positive. One other thing that just was worth mentioning, Ben, because I think this incident blew up in the kind of wonky arms control, like Iran nerd circles that we traffic in over the weekend was Iran fired two missiles at a place called Diego Garcia, which is this joint U.S. U.S. U.S. military base in the Indian Ocean. Neither missile hit its target. One seems to have failed en route. The other might have been taken out by U.S. missile defense systems. But Iran seeming to be able to target something 2,500 miles away surprised a lot of people because the previous sort of conventional wisdom was that Iran's missiles

only had a 2,000 kilometer range. But Diego Garcia is 4,000 kilometers away. And so that led a lot of people, especially war supporters, to say, see, Iran is lying. They always lie. Like, it is an imminent threat to the U.S. This is why we had to go to war. And I think it's worth just offering some context on that. So, like, first of all, the 2,000 kilometer limit on Iran's ballistic missiles was one voluntarily put in place by the Iranians. But I think every real, like Iran expert, questioned it, first of all, and whether they were telling the truth, but also knew that Iran could take some simple step to increase the range of those missiles, like reducing the size of the warhead. If you make the thing lighter, it can go further.

They also knew that Iran has been researching space launch technology, which is essentially ICBM technology. Maybe they could use that as a dual purpose. And then finally, if you bomb a country, if you go to war with Iran, they're probably going to do away with some of the previous self-imposed limits on their military technology. So, again, not really surprising in any way. But Ben, I mean, how big a deal did you think this was? I thought it was notable, not necessarily a huge deal. They're trying to fire at everything they possibly can. They're trying to make it feel like the reach of their weaponry

puts at risk all U.S. military facilities within range of any weapon they have. And so this is just one more example of them kind of trying to empty the kit to make the U.S. feel vulnerable everywhere. Now, we don't know that this signifies like a substantial additional capability in terms of the range of their ballistic missiles. It didn't like, you know, make contact with like the target either. So to me, it's just the Iranians, you know, messaging again. And yeah, you're right. Like they're innovating on the fly.

I mean, one thing that happens in wartime, we've seen this in Russia and Ukraine, is that when you're under the immense pressure of an existential war, you just start innovating. and you just start trying new things. And that could be what's happening here. It's also the case that I just don't trust at all the briefings from the United States and Israel, including the U.S. military. Yes. Right? Because, like, they told us that, you know, I think 90% of Iranian ballistic missiles are destroyed in launchers.

Meanwhile, they keep firing them every day. I was talking to someone who's an expert in this stuff, by the way, like more MAGA than not. And this person was saying this stat from DOD and the Israelis that, Iran is like there's been a 90% reduction in launch since day one is total bullshit. Iran is still firing ballistic missiles. More of them are getting through. They're having more devastating consequences. They have clearly figured out how to adapt to hide them to husband resources.

And stats relative to day one are just, it's meaningless because Iran is playing a long game. Right. And like that is what's so frustrating about the bullshit you hear from Hegsath. And even from Dan Cain, who I think is much more like honest and honorable in those briefings. but still is falling way short of where a previous chairman would be. Way short. And we have to name this, right? Because the people in the military, you know, don't have to go along with this.

And they don't have to put out bullshit, you know, information because it makes Hegset feel like he has a more macho Fox and Friends briefing that he can give. It's disappointing to me. Because I don't know how to trust it anymore. How do you trust people? I mean, Trump said that all of Iranian military capability, he was. destroyed. We know that's BS. But this 90% figure we've heard for a while, like what we're seeing with their own eyes in terms of Iranian ballistic missile launches, including against Israel,

is suggested that that's just not true. Yeah, I mean, look, on Tuesday, an Iranian ballistic missile hit Tel Aviv. It caused a bunch of damage, injured to poor people. Over the weekend, an Iranian ballistic missile hit a town near Israel's nuclear research facility. Iran seems to be doing a lot of kind of like tit-for-tat strikes. Like, if you hit near one of our nuclear sites, we'll hit your, Like I said, you know, 1,500 people are believed to be dead. In Iran, the Strait of Hormuz is basically closed. Like a huge chunk of the world doesn't have access to energy fertilizer. There could be a global, you know, food shortage, political instability and starvation.

So everything is getting worse. Donald Trump keeps saying, oh, yeah, we have air supremacy. We sunk their Navy. Well, you know, we had erred supremacy over the Taliban for 20 years. They didn't have a Navy there and what happened in that war. Let's turn to Lebanon, Denny's. because you did an excellent interview last week with Kim Gettis about Israel's military campaign in Lebanon that I think folks should listen to in full. But unfortunately, a lot of what she talked about in that

conversation is coming to pass because it looks like Israel is planning to occupy parts of Lebanon. The Israeli defense minister, Israel Kat, said on Tuesday that Israel is going to control the territory in southern Lebanon up to the Latani River, which is about 15 or 20 miles, from the border between the two countries. So hundreds of thousands of people have had to flee their homes already from the south. Overall, there's more than a million people displaced in Lebanon, which is about a fifth of the population. And Israel is now bombing bridges that cross the Latani River.

I think there's been five of them total that have been blown up. By the way, did you see one of the bridges? I mean, there was an RT correspondent doing a standup right next to it as it was bombed. The guy was almost killed. It's horrifying. So the IDF says they're bombing these bridges because they're preventing the flow of Hezbollah fighters into southern Lebanon. but obviously bombing these bridges is going to cut off any remaining civilians in the area

and then potentially cut them off from food, water, like any humanitarian access. So it will lead to a crisis. And stepping back, we remember Lebanon, Hezbollah entered this most recent iteration of the war by firing rockets at Israel after Israel killed the Supreme Leader of Iran. As you discussed with Kim, I think, Ben, the Lebanese government and a lot of citizens of Lebanon are furious at Hezbollah, including Shia, for dragging them back into this war. war, but they can't do anything about it because Hezbo has the guns. So Ben, I imagine it's hard for our listeners to imagine, like, wrap your heads around the scale of this evacuation order.

Because we're talking about like 800,000 people to a million people getting displaced in a country of like, I think, five, six million people. And I was talking to a friend with family in Beirut who said that one thing compounding the problem is that everyone is afraid of strangers right now because you don't want to rent a room in your building to someone you don't know who is displaced from southern Lebanon because what if that person has a connection to Hezbollah or is perceived to have one from the Assad and your building gets bombed by the IDF, right? And so that is going to further exacerbate sectarian tensions. It is all very bad and it's likely to get worse because the Israelis are talking about the Lebanon conflict as one that would extend beyond the Iran

conflict. And also, the press keeps talking about Israel creating a buffer zone. It's like, What? They're annexing and occupying territory. But call it what it is. Absolutely. I mean, you covered it well. I think what I would focus on is what is Israel's objective here, right? Because there's something, and the Diego Garcia piece ties into this.

The Israel and, you know, Netanyahu and then all the kind of APEC adjacent think tankers, if the enemy is strong, it's a reason to go to war with them. And that the enemy is weak, it's a reason to go to war with them. That's a really good point. And so let's just look at Israel's track record since October 7th, because what they've done is destroy a lot of things, but let's think about what they have actually accomplished strategically, right? They were, we heard that they were going to destroy Hamas.

They didn't destroy Hamas. Hamas is still in Gaza. They destroyed Gaza. They killed tens of thousands of children. Hamas is still there. Then all these, you know, A-PAC types, you know, they can't stop talking about the pager operation. Remember the operation where they blew up a bunch of Hezboa guys and some other people

by, like, you know, infiltrating their pagers? Well, guess what? Hezbo is still there. You know, Hezbo is still in Lebanon. You know, did they solve that problem? No. The 12-day war, that we obliterated the Iranian nuclear program. we're back. They keep destroying things and coming back and destroying more things. And so if we just

take Lebanon, what is the objective here? Because they are destroying Lebanon, right? They've got a fifth of the population displaced. They're turning people against each other. The politics are becoming more toxic. They are blowing up apartment buildings just to kill a few Hezbollah targets in them. So they're killing a lot of people there. To what end? And this, this area that they're occupying, you know, You know, you've got Ben Gavir talking about, you know, in his pretty senior minister in the Israeli government, annexing southern Lebanon. And meanwhile, the American media credulously describes it as a buffer zone. They're blowing up bridges.

Buffer to what? Like, would we be describing if this was any other place on earth, you know, if Mexico took, you know, 15 to 20 miles into Texas. Yeah. Or we did to Canada, yeah. Because they said, you know, yeah, if we did that to Canada, I don't think we, we would credulous be like, well, these guys need a buffer zone. Like, no, there's sovereign borders.

Like, this isn't even the West Bank. Like, Lebanon has had a border that's been internationally recognized for a very long time. And they're basically just destroying that core tenant of international law. Yeah, it's a really bad situation that it's going to get worse before it gets better. And by the way, we have not a time, like Iran has kind of blotted out the sun on the show. And we have not had time to talk about what's happening in the West Bank with this wave of settler. It's kicked off since the war started, but it's something we should get back to because it is truly awful and worth highlighting. This podcast is sponsored by Squarespace.

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You just download the Wise app today or visit wise.com terms and conditions apply. Let's switch gears, though, been to Europe because we've been watching closely for years now, like the rise of far right political parties in Europe. The trajectory has felt quite bad for a while. Like, you know, I think we were speculating on the show early on earlier this year that we could be heading towards far-right parties controlling big swaths of Germany in 2026 and then even the French presidency in 27. That obviously could still happen, but there have been some bumps in the road, thanks to our president, Donald Trump, because it turns out that trying to annex Greenland

is not that popular. It turns out that starting an idiotic war with Iran is not that popular. And here's some evidence for you guys. So the most obvious impact of Trump's policies come to us from Denmark. Folks probably remember Denmark government. Burns Greenland, the Danish Prime Minister metta Frederikson called early elections to capitalize on her popularity after she got in this big fight with Trump over Greenland. We don't have results as of this recording, but going into the race, she was seen as the frontrunner. And there was a great piece in the Atlantic this week about how the far right nationalist

populist Danish People's Party in Denmark went from super pro-Trump to one of its members saying, quote, let me put it in words you might understand, Mr. Trump, fuck off. So that's a bit of a change. In Italy, the Prime Minister Georgia Maloney's right-wing government just lost a judicial reform referendum pretty badly. It was 54 to 46. The underlying issues are pretty technical and wonky,

so we're just going to skip past them because they don't really matter for this. But what you should know is it became seen as a referendum on Georgia Maloney, and she lost. And now she's seeing headlines like this one from Politico, quote, referendum defeat brings Italy's Maloney crashing down to earth. So that's just, again,

mood music is bad for her. In Slovenia, there was a parliamentary election over the weekend, and the center-left freedom parties barely leading the right-wing Democratic Party. But this race has interesting ties to Victor Orban in Hungary and an organization called Black Cube that is near and dear to our hearts here, pot say of the world. Well, friends of mine. Yeah, so let's put a pin in that one and come back to it. And then finally, Ben, in France, there were a bunch of municipal elections. The results were a mixed bag. The far-right National Rally Party had some successes. But like every party had some successes, the centrist had some successes, the left had some. But National Rally won seats in smaller towns and smaller cities, but failed to win its biggest

target, which is Marseille, which is France's second biggest city. And it's also in a region that is a stronghold for the national rally and has been for a while. Emmanuel Gregor, the center left socialist, he won the runoff election in Paris. National rally continues to do terribly in Paris. But then, interestingly, Ben, in previous elections, the key to defeating the far right was getting all the parties from the center to the left united in opposition. But I was listening to, I think, this BBC political analyst talking about how in this past election, a lot of the socialist parties fared better if they rejected the far left because the far, far left has become so toxic under Melanchol.

So it's a bit of a mess. I guess I'm going to choose to take a little bit of hope away from these results while also stealing myself for the reality that, you know, an economic crisis or a migration crisis because of the Iran war. is the kind of thing that will fuel the far right in Europe. And also, like, you know, these are very low turnout elections while the presidential elections see closer to 75, 85%. But any takeaways from you based on what you watched? So a couple of small things and then the big thing, right?

So on Slovenia, there are a lot of converging threads here for parts of the world listeners. Because one thing is Black Cube is this group of former Mossad agents that spied on me back in the good old days of the first Trump term. And, you know, I think widely, they traffic in these kind of far-right circles. So they also notably have done some work in Hungary over the years to discredit Victor Orban's opponents. And so shortly before the election, a few days, a group of journalists and activists in Slovenia

did their own investigation and it exposed these black cube ties to the far-right candidate who was way up in the polls in Slovenia. One of them was Nika Kovach, who's a friend of mine who's been on this podcast before talking about her advocacy on reproductive rights in Europe. And that did not go over well in Slovenia because people saw it as foreign election interference, a group of a bunch of former Mossad people making contact with the far right there to help him come to power. And so you had this surge at the end for the very progressive prime minister Slovenia, and you essentially had a photo finish, and actually a slight lead for the progressive. Now, we'll see what happens in government information, et cetera, but a significant underperformance

in Slovenia for the far right in Slovenia, which is often seen as kind of a bellwether, you know, of where politics are going in Central Europe, particularly head of the Hungarian election in April. So that's good. In Italy, Maloney, you know, these constitutional referendums have often been bellwethers. So Mateo Renzi, for instance, was the more progressive prime minister of Italy at the end of the Obama years. He staked a lot on a constitutional referendum to amend the electoral laws in Italy. He lost, and that was seen as kind of letting the air out of the balloon for Renzi, he lost the next general election.

Now, Maloney kept, she had a kind of odd political strategy with this referendum. At first she kind of didn't campaign that hard for it, but then she got involved. She definitely lost. She lost significantly. And so this kind of oar invincibility around her has been punctured. And she's the most talented far-right politician in Europe. By far, yeah. So by far. And I talked to some friends there who said that in the later last days of the campaign, all the energy, right, in the streets and online, was with the opposition.

Suddenly young people are getting motivated to, you know, oppose Maloney. That's a big deal. And so then that leads me to kind of where are we big picture? Well, look, this could still go horribly wrong. They could still win the French presidential election. They could still make gains in Germany the far right over time. But we're not seeing that kind of groundswell. Like, even in mixed results in France, people were worried there was going to be like this wave of national rally candidates getting elected.

That didn't happen. And I think Trump's recklessness and his interventions in European politics are not helping these far right parties. And that, to me, is the headline. You know, people can see this is what. far-right leadership looks like. I don't know if I want that. And I certainly don't want Donald Trump and J.D.Ns coming over here and trying to mess around

in my politics or, for that matter, BB Netanyahu and Black Cube. Yeah, and lecturing me and like trying to ride heard and tell us what to do. Ben, did you see who won the mayoral race in the little French town of R.C. Sorobb? I missed it. Hitler. What? Charles Hitler with two T's.

He didn't see that one coming. He's an independent candidate. who won his reelection over Zelensky. Antoine Zelensky. This is a real thing that happened in France. Did you find this? Charles Hitler. I was watching some, what's like French 24?

Like some YouTube thing and they did a big piece on Chuckie Hitler. Like, what that tells me is dream big dreams kids. Because most of you would probably think if your last name is Hitler, you can't run for office. But Charles showed the naysayers wrong. wouldn't you explore a name change if oh god yeah if you're a politician go with the silent h or something eatler yeah yeah anything hither hither hither there's yeah hither is a nice or come hit yeah Hank Charles like flip them around I don't anything else uh finally Ben so we got a lot of stories a lot of wars lately like information leaks

they're flying at us from every direction got poor mouchtaba hominei having his sexuality questioned as you mentioned earlier because wiki leaks published a report that he sought ed treatment in the UK. The Mossad reportedly... Clearly not Hymns, which is, you know, sponsored this podcast in the past. Hey, Mshaba, we got you covered. We got a code for you, buddy. The Mossad was hacking Iran's traffic cameras to track, like, the Supreme

Leader through Tehran. The White House had the infamous Signalgate fiasco. But today's Opsack story comes to us via a familiar name to long-time Pod Save of the World listeners. Strava, do you Strava, Ben? It's like you basically log your jogs. Okay, well, you make sure it's set on private.

Because according to Le Monde, a seaman that they're referring to as Arthur, went for a jog on the deck of a French nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaul, and logged his very respectable 4.5 miles and 35 minutes on his smart watch, which unfortunately was linked to Strava, which was set to public. So anyone who looked could see these little curly cues through the Mediterranean and thus locate the ship, which, which is. She's a bit of a no-no when you have the Iranians firing missiles at Diego Garcia or other bases, you know, thousands, thousands of miles away. This was not the first Strava incident. I'm sure you remember this. We've covered this on the show before. It's been used to pinpoint Joe Biden's travel, thanks to secret service agents working out. So-called Strava heat maps identified the locations of secret U.S. military bases and CIA facilities all over Africa

in the Middle East. They have, like, the running routes have been used to identify the exact perimeter of CIA bases in Syria and Afghanistan and the list goes on and on. So just a little advice to Arthur and all the other Strava fans

deployed overseas by a stopwatch. So this lit up my Strava group chat. Tommy. I was actually on this right away because I'm a big devouté of Strava. I'm actually here on my kid's spring break. You know, you can track your skiing on Strava, too. I will show you. All my skiing has been logged. I got vertical feed. I've got a heat map of everywhere I skied. Thankfully, I'm not in a sensitive military theater. I will tell you also that I know some people, including some friends we have in common who told me that when you go to these deployments,

you know, like in Eastern Syria or something where you're like on an airstrip, basically, living in a trailer, the only thing to do is work out is to run quite literally like it's not like a mall you know so so so like these guys get in really good shape because they're just like jogging around this airstrip and the strava thing is probably the only thing interesting for them like you know tracking their time so yeah we need to have an encrypted uh strava app or something yeah listen i get it also i recently became a fitbit guy am i proud of it no does it look cool absolutely not um do i find it useful yes so here we are. But yeah, I mean, if I were, well, it means like there's still an underlying problem of if you're jogging with your phone, like someone can track your GPS, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. God only knows what the Russians are doing. But also, I mean, actually, Strava has got, some Russian soldiers got got fucking around in Ukraine back in the day before anyone knew about it because they were using Strava to, you know, I think the Mossad got got to. So I don't know. It's a rave new world out there, buddy. These apps are all penit, you know, like I've heard from people in the business that, like, you know, if you want to have a, like, people use a grinder to, like, have, like, private chats, you know, like, it's just all these ways to penetrate apps and to communicate, to locate, to disparage, you know, all these, all these things. It's a dystopia we live in. Grindr is one good way to penetrate.

Okay, we are going to take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to listen to my conversation with Edward Fisher, He's the author of Choke Points, American Power, and the Age of Economic Warfare. We're going to talk about all the economic costs of the war with Iran, the closure of the Strait of Hamoos, all the ways it's exposed massive economic vulnerabilities for the United States. So stick around for that. Today's show is sponsored by strawberry.me. Let me ask you something.

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It's like therapy for your career. My guest today is an expert on sanctions. He's the director of the Center for Geo Economics of the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of Choke Points, American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare. Edward Fishman, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me on today, Tommy. Thank you for doing this. So we're talking about Iran here in the ongoing closure of the Strait of Hamos and the economic cost of it.

The head of the IEA, the International Energy Agency, said that this closure of the Strait of Hormuz is the greatest threat to global energy, quote, in history. That sounds bad. Can you help us understand what does that mean exactly and how alarmed we should be? about the outlook for the global economy because of this energy supply shortage? Sure. Well, I'd say alarmed is probably the short answer. The Strait of Hormuz is the world's most important maritime choke point. Before this war, about 20% of global oil and 20% of liquefied natural gas flowed through the Strait of Hormuz on any given day. So that's, you know, two out of every 10 barrels of oil, to a very substantial percentage of global oil supplies.

And frankly, we never have had this much oil come off the global marketplace. You go back to 2022, the last time we had a big oil price spike in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. We actually didn't even have any supply disruption. But let's say we did. Russia only sells 5 million barrels of crude oil and another 2.5 million barrels of petroleum products each day. So it's less than half of what's being disrupted right now at the Strait of Pormuz.

So we are dealing with a monumental shock to the global. energy system. And there's really not an end in sight so far. Yeah. And then I know that Iran's hit oil refineries and gas facilities in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. Qatar says 17% of its export capacity has been damaged maybe for three to five years to get it all fixed. There's also, you know, some oil fields are calling in force majeure on their contracts. If the war ended tomorrow in the strait was fully opened, how long do you think it would take to kind of fix the damage that has been done already and to get us back to where we were? I mean, to get to a status quo ante, it would take years.

I mean, Ross Lafon, the LNG facility you just mentioned in Qatar, is the world's largest LNG facility. And just so to understand, I mean, liquefied natural gas has become increasingly important since 2022 because Russia, which had been exporting a lot of the pipeline gas that went to Europe, has no longer a reliable supplier. And so our European allies have been increasingly dependent. on importing natural gas that's liquefied into a cool liquid and scent on tankers. Well, a lot of that is coming from Qatar.

And to your point, the cutteries have said that that facility is not going to be back to 100% for several years. But setting that aside, I mean, even just to unwind the snarls and supply chains, it's going to take several months. Iraq has shut in oil. Refinaries have cut back their runs. And these are really exquisite, complicated systems that, once you turn them off, they can take quite a long time to turn back on.

Yeah, I've read that, you know, if you permanently shut a well, it can get clogged, like paraffin wax can build up. You can take, like, get the blast, right, hot oil in there to try to free it up. I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. I'm encouraging things I read in the F.T. Has any of that happened yet? Have they permanently shut down any wells yet, or are we still going to get to that point? Oh, yeah.

Yeah. I mean, Iraq had to shut in wells within a few days of the conflict starting. I mean, it's because a lot of the, you know, these oil producers, they had already filled up their storage. And if you think about it, you had all of these tankers that are stranded in the Gulf and they have nowhere to go. And so, yes, you've already had a significant percentage of oil shut in. Oof, not good. So, you know, in the U.S., this conversation kind of manifests, it's often about higher gas prices, right? Like, gas prices are up a buck nationally or something

like that. But internationally in other parts of the world, it's much worse. Like there's reporting about Bangladesh closing universities to conserve electricity. Nepal is rationing cooking gas. Schools are going remote in Pakistan. I think I heard Laos has closed down 40% of its gas stations due to just lack of supply. What other things are you hearing about extreme measures the countries are having to take? And what do you think happens to these countries if this war drags on for months? Do they have any other options? So look, the commonality of a lot of those countries you mentioned is they're developing countries. And I think what that shows is that, even in a scenario where you have a significant shortage of crude oil on the marketplace,

rich countries are going to get their oil. They're going to pay higher prices for it. In the United States, we're going to feel it in the form of inflation. We could feel it in the form of slowing economic growth as well, depending on how long it lasts. But in developing countries, you actually already have acute shortages. To add to your list, I mean, the Philippines has gone to four-day work weeks. You know, you have government officials being told that they should take the stairs instead of taking elevators. you have already significant, you know, rationing that's going on in other parts of the world.

And you can just imagine how much worse this will get. The other thing just to mention here is the Straton-Foomuz is the world's most important maritime chokepoint for the energy sector. But it's critical for other industries, too. You know, one-third of fertilizer goes through the Stratiform moves on a daily basis. So if this lasts for a long time, it could also create shortages in food supplies. You know, you could see significant humanitarian concerns as well. Yeah, I want to get to that in a second. But you were a sanctions expert in a past life.

What did you make of the United States, like, temporarily removing sanctions on Iran and allowing them to sell, what was 140 million barrels of oil? Is that seems a little touch unprecedented now? Yeah, it's a pretty remarkable development. I think just, I'm always hesitant to quantify sanctions relief because, you know, what we control is what's permitted, and then the market decides what the actual economic relief is. The only way to compare this apples to apples to previous examples of sanctions relief is to look at what was permitted this time versus, for instance, what was permitted under the Iran nuclear deal in 2015. Well, in the Iran nuclear deal in 2015, the United States eased nuclear-related secondary sanctions.

So we didn't actually relieve any of the primary embargo. The United States wasn't buying oil from Iran. We weren't allowing payments for Iranian oil to go through the U.S. financial system. this license that Trump issued last week does allow the United States to buy oil from Iran, and it does allow Iran to collect payment using the U.S. financial system. So in really important respects, it actually goes beyond the relief that was offered in the 2015 nuclear deal. So if you just consider what kind of an incentive that provides to Iran, you know, a previous generation of Iranian leaders negotiated away large parts of their nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.

Well, this current group of Iranian leaders closed the Strait of Hormuz for three weeks and got just as much, if not more, sanctions relief. So I worry that that has really negative ramifications for whether Iran or, frankly, other countries are ready to come to the negotiating table with the United States to try to obtain relief from sanctions or other pressure. Yeah, it's not hard to draw the lesson from that example. As you just mentioned, I mean, the conversation around the Strait of Hormuz is often about oil and gas shipments, and rightly so because, it's like what, 20% of the petroleum products flow through it. But it's also a critical transit point for helium, for a bunch of types of fertilizer or many other commodities. Can you talk about what the impact you think will be beyond just oil and gas? Why should people care about helium? And then talk about the food crisis element of this. Yeah, I'm glad I think those are probably two good ones to focus on helium and fertilizer because they kind of affect different parts of the world. So helium is essential for the production of might. microchips, you know, these semiconductors that we're relying on to fuel data centers and ultimately help us win the AI race in the United States. Well, if we are short on those microchips because we don't have access to helium, that's going to have significant ramifications for

the plans of big tech companies to build out these data centers. And on the stock market, Americans' wealth right now is largely tied up in the performance of big tech. And so if this last for a long period of time and prevents data centers for being built because of helium shortages and also, frankly, because a lot of those data centers were scheduled to be built in the Gulf region, a region that's now in the middle of a massive war, where you've had a number of data centers actually attacked by Iran in the last few weeks in countries like the UAE. I mean, that could have substantial ramifications for the whole AI boom. It could burst the AI bubble and have untoward consequences for all of our stock market portfolios in the U.S. and the rest

of the developed world. I think fertilizer and the ramifications for food, I mean, that has really, really substantial potential problems for the developing world because developing countries rely on fertilizer coming through the Strait of Hormuz even more, frankly, than the developed world. I think Sudan, you know, which is obviously in the midst of a terrible humanitarian crisis right now, relies on the Strait of Formeus for over half of its fertilizer needs. So you can just imagine that if this plays out for a long period of time, there could be significant famines that occurs around the world. Yeah, I'm horribly worried about the food supply shortages,

and it's just, of course, the poorest places on the planet will get hurt the most and the fastest. I mean, on this sort of like duality of the point there, you're also seeing, you know, these cities in the Gulf, countries in the Gulf take this massive economic hit. Like a place like Dubai, right? It's this economic miracle over the past 50 years. All of a sudden, this is a center.

for banking, for investment, for all these expats. And now people are terrified, right? They're living under assault. There's drone strikes on buildings. They're scared shitless. I think the UAE is knocked down like something like 2,000 projectiles from Iran. Do you have any sense of what, like, what the long-term economic impact could be on a place like Dubai going forward? Maybe it's unknowable, but it does seem like it's been a wake-up call for a lot of people. Yeah. I think this is a real tragedy of this war. Because all of those countries you mentioned in the Gulf, including the UAE, I mean, for decades, they have been trying to get out of this situation where they're just commodities exporters. They're just selling oil and gas, and that's really their entire economic model. And look, many of these countries have had success in recent years, including the UAE in terms of diversifying their economy, you know, moving into higher value-added industries, becoming capital providers, including for, again, the AI race. I worry. that this war is going to have lingering consequences for the Gulf region. I think for starters,

assuming that the Iranian regime remains in place, which does feel like the base case scenario right now absent a massive escalation in the military campaign by the Trump administration, there's going to be some level of arms race that occurs in the Gulf region. There's going to be concern on an ongoing basis about the risk of drone strikes from Iran and missile strikes from Iran. And I worry that companies are going to be reluctant to invest billions of dollars to build things like data centers or to open novel industries in the Gulf. So I do worry that a lot of the progress that has been made in cities like Dubai really does hang in the balance right now. Yeah. So look, the U.S. in Israel and Iran have been engaged in, you know, some level of warfare for a very long time.

Some of it was covert action, but then there's more overt stuff. right like the kosem solomani strike in 2020 was a pretty severe moment it led to a ballistic missile response from the iranians but at no point did iran ever close the strait of formuz until now and i'm wondering why you think that is you know sort of where maybe they got that idea and whether you think they might now feel like oh you know what this is a lever we can pull uh and we might pull again going forward uh you know short of the supreme leader being you know killed Yeah, I think one of the puzzles of this war so far, Tommy, is why is it that the United States seemed surprised by Iran's closure of the Strait of Hormuz? And it's clear that there's probably some shoddy planning that went in. But to give folks a little bit of credit, I think the assumption had always been that for Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz, they would have to lay thousands of sea mines and make the strait physically impossible, make it difficult for any ship to get through, less they're, you

potentially blow up by virtue of stumbling upon a sea mine. Well, the thing is that the U.S. didn't think Iran would take that step because, of course, if you had thousands of mines in the Strait of Hormuz, Iran wouldn't be able to sell its oil. So I think the assumption was Iran's not going to commit economic suicide in order to mine the Strait of Hormuz. Well, guess what? They found a different way to do it. Just by using these cheap drones and missiles and attacking about a dozen or so ships, they really haven't actually attacked that many vessels. They've been able to change the risk calculus of the entire global shipping industry. They've effectively established themselves as this psychological gatekeeper over the Strait of Hormuz.

And it's interesting because in some ways, they learn the lesson from America's own sanctions. If you think about how the United States bent the financial system to its will over the last two decades, it wasn't through sanctioning every single bank doing business with Iran. It was only sanctioning a handful of them. I remember when I was working on this issue in the Obama administration, and we were trying to persuade China to reduce their purchases of Iranian oil, we only sanctioned one small Chinese bank, Bank of Kunlan in 2012, and that was enough to get all the other banks in China to fall in line, to shape the risk calculus of the financial sector. Iran has now pulled off something similar with the global energy industry, with the global shipping industry. And I think that so long as this regime stays in place, that threat is going to be there. And that's the That's why right now they're going so far as to demand payment, demand tolls, basically, for ships going through the Strait of Hormuz. It's really remarkable. And so, look, the final question for you.

I mean, Iran is debatably winning a war against the United States and Israel simply by closing the Strait of Hormuz. China won a trade war with the United States simply by blocking the export of rare earth minerals that we in the U.S. need for electronics of all kinds, from cell phones to drones. Is this the future of warfare? And if so, are there other like Achilles heels you're seeing out there for the U.S. that you think we should be talking about? Short answer is yes. I mean, this is why I saw fit to write a book called choke points about economic warfare. Living in a hyper-globalized economy with all of these sort of single points of failure,

you are really handing over a whole lot of economic leverage to all different kinds of countries around the world. We saw last year what China can do. when it throttles the global supply of rare earth minerals. It got the Trump administration to completely reverse its China policy, right? I mean, this pivot on China that was ushered in during the first Trump term to be more hawkish, to cut off their supplies of semiconductors to impose tariffs, all of that right now is in the process of being walked back because China weaponized a choke point against the United States. Well, now Iran has pulled off something similar by weaponizing their control of the world's most important maritime chokepoint,

the Strait of Hormuz. They've completely changed the Trump administration's war aims. They vacillated between regime change, denuclearization, military degradation. Well, now they have one overarching aim that's reopening the strait, which is fighting on Iran's terms. There are many other choke points in the global economy. I think one that worries me especially now, if you look at kind of the longer term consequences of this war, to me, one of the easiest bets right now is to think that many, many countries around the world are going to triple down on efforts to electrify their economies, to go solar, to adopt. electric vehicles, battery technologies. Well, guess what?

China dominates all of those industries. Every single one. So even if we're okay at home, living on fossil fuels to the end of time, if all of our allies in Europe and Asia completely embrace electric technologies and China dominates 90% of most of those industries, that hands China a heck of a whole lot of choke points

that it will be able to use to leverage against American allies. That's not to say they shouldn't electrify. It's to say that here in the United States, we really need to wake up and start competing with China in these industries of the future. Yeah, never mind if they take Taiwan and TSM and all of a sudden there's no chips. There you go. That's another choke point for you.

Too many choke points. The book is choke points American power in the age of economic warfare. Edward Fisherman, thank you so much for doing the show. Really important stuff. And I appreciate it. Yeah, my pleasure. Good to see you. Thanks again to Edward Fisherman for joining the show.

And I will be gone next week. Unlike Ben, I'm too lazy to work on my kids' spring break. So, but I'll see you guys a week after that. So I'll miss you. I'll be here with Alona. Oh, yeah. Holding down the fore. You're going to crush.

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