The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 4 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
For Donald Trump, the news is getting worse on his war against Iran. A preliminary military report finds that the U.S. was behind the bombing of an Iranian nursery school, killing scores of children. New reporting confirms that the Trump team badly miscalculated Iran’s response to their invasion, leading to a developing energy fiasco, with some officials growing pessimistic about the lack of a strategy to finish the war—and they’re afraid to tell that to the president.
Trump is publicly acknowledging none of this. He just urged oil companies to use the Strait of Hormuz regardless of danger, and he’s refusing to comment on how he’ll know when it’s time to end the war. So how do we get out of this situation if Trump’s unwilling to acknowledge the situation we’re in? We’re posing this question to Elizabeth Saunders, a political scientist at Columbia who focuses on foreign policy and has a new piece on the huge mess we’re in. Elizabeth, good to have you on.
Elizabeth Saunders: Thanks. Good to be here.
Sargent: So let’s start with the Strait of Hormuz, which abuts Iran and connects the Persian Gulf to the wider world. Can you just define the importance of the Strait of Hormuz in global terms, and how bad is the energy situation right now?
Saunders: So basically this mess is like turning off the spigot that controls 20 percent of the world’s oil flow. And it’s literally like you have running water and then it’s 20 percent less—and it’s all because of this choke point in the Strait of Hormuz. And so the supply is going down and that sends the price of oil up. And it’s not like a normal oil shock where the Saudis or OPEC can get together and restart production, because these tankers are stuck inside the Persian Gulf. And the Gulf states have already filled up their storage tanks. And so they have to shut down the oil fields, which are not easy to restart.
This is one of those shocks that is going to be very hard to get back to any sort of status quo before the war. And there’s also no end in sight, because this is not like when the container ship got stuck in the Suez Canal, right? Remember, istheboat stuck.com? Once the boat is unstuck, the canal reopens. This is not going to be like that, because the Iranians have so much weaponry and power and they’re not going anywhere, because that’s where they live. And so you now basically have 20 percent of the world’s oil flow held hostage, essentially, by Iran.
And this has always been a threat. And one of the big reasons why presidents for 20 years who’ve considered striking Iran have been deterred from doing so is because this is such a dramatic shock to the world economy. The oil market is global. And so it’s not as though we can just pump more oil out of the ground in the U.S. to make up for it. It’s a global energy market.
And so that’s going to drive the price of oil up. I’m no oil expert, no energy market expert, but if you make something 20 percent more scarce, it’s clearly going to have an effect. And that doesn’t even account for the problem of getting things back online, which will not necessarily be smooth.
Sargent: Can you just define the importance of the Strait of Hormuz in global terms? And how bad is the energy situation right now?
Saunders: It’s pretty bad, because 20 percent of the world’s oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz, which is a choke point 24 miles wide—but really much less than that, because it’s so shallow and the Iranians can target it from the shore. So tankers have been stuck and they can’t get through. And so this is backing up the world’s oil supply and driving up the price of oil, because when things get more scarce, the price goes up.
Since the war began, oil prices have gone up around 20 percent. It’s been very volatile, but on average, I think that’s sort of the latest estimate. And of course, eventually that will mean prices will go up at the gas pump for Americans. And it’s only likely to get worse. We can talk about why that is, but I don’t see this ending cleanly anytime soon.
Sargent: Well, let’s listen to Trump on this for a second. Here he’s asked whether oil companies should use the Strait of Hormuz. Listen.
Reporter (voiceover): Are you talking to CEOs of various oil companies, encouraging them to use the Strait of Hormuz right now?
Donald Trump (voiceover): Yeah, I think they should. I think they should. I think they should use it, if you want my opinion. Look, we took out just about all of their mine ships in one night. We’re up to boat number 60; I didn’t realize they had that big a navy.
Sargent: So he doesn’t know how big Iran’s navy is, which—you’d think he should know as commander in chief. But that aside, what’s the story with what you’re hearing there? How do you make sense of it? What do you think is going to happen with the Strait? Trump is trying to secure it, he’s trying to get oil companies to use it, and even though it puts them in danger, it’s a little hard to parse. What do you make of it?
Saunders: To be honest, I think he just has no grasp of what the situation really is. I think he wants brave captains to run the Strait of Hormuz like in Star Wars—you know, the Kessel Run or whatever it is. And I don’t mean to make light of it, because it’s a dangerous state of affairs. He wants these ships to be taking on very dangerous journeys through this very narrow, very shallow strait that may now have mines.
As he said in that clip, he said they’ve destroyed all their mining ships. That’s absolutely not true. They may have distributed some of the mines around Iran so that they couldn’t be targeted directly in one go. They may have already laid some mines. We don’t fully know, but I would say that is not something we can just take on Trump’s say-so.
This is not something the world, and in particular the financial world that insures these ships, and the companies that run these ships, and the pilots and captains, you know, the people who crew these ships, can unsee. Iran struck these tankers—at least three, at last count, that I saw today, and I may already be out of date. And if you look at these images of tankers on fire, what captain, what company in their right mind would send a tanker laden with fuel through the Strait of Hormuz? It’s really dangerous.
And so there’s been talk of a naval escort by the U.S., and the Navy is simply not equipped to do that. And even if it were, it really does not want to, because it makes the U.S. naval ships a target as well, right? These ballistic missiles that Iran has could hit these ships—they can attack them from the shore and they can also mine the Strait. And this is a problem that U.S. military planners and analysts, national security analysts, and presidential administrations have been thinking about for 20 years. And every president until Trump has been deterred from doing it, precisely because this is such a mess.
Sargent: Well, it’s a good thing we have the Art of the Deal guy here to figure this out for us. I mean, the New York Times reports that Trump’s team badly misjudged how Iran would respond to the invasion to begin with, kind of creating this mess.
I want to read a sentence from the Times piece because it’s amazing:
“Inside the administration, some officials are growing pessimistic about the lack of a clear strategy to finish the war, but they have been careful not to express that directly to the president, who has repeatedly declared that the military operation is a complete success.”
Elizabeth, let’s take this in two parts. First, how crazy is it that Trump officials are not allowed—or are afraid—to talk to him about the situation we’re in?
Saunders: I mean, it’s classic personalist dictatorship yes-man behavior. So it is crazy. And I have written before about how the constraints on Trump, especially in the national security and military force area, are basically gone.
But what is interesting is they may not want to tell it to Trump’s face, but they’re all falling over themselves to leak to the press—it wasn’t their idea, they thought it was terrible, we gave him the warnings, right? And not just the ones from the Pentagon before the war, but now.
And that is quite interesting, because victory has a thousand fathers, but failure is an orphan, right? They’re trying to put the failure at Trump’s door. And that’s one of the problems with being a personalist leader: things do fall at your door.
So it’s pretty clear that nobody looked down the proverbial game tree at the next move that Iran would make. And closing the Strait as a war move has got to be, if not number one, very, very high on the list of things Iran would do—it’s its biggest point of leverage. But clearly this was not integrated into the decision-making. And, you know, it’s just the latest incredibly painful and costly and deadly reminder of what it means to purge government and decision-making of all the experts.
Sargent: I want to pull on the thread that you just laid out there—on how this really suggests that people are starting to leak already that, you know, it wasn’t their idea to get into this mess. And they’re constrained from telling the despot—the ailing, angry, delusional despot—that we’re in a real fix. It’s just an odd situation.
Can you talk a little bit more about how personalist dictatorship rulers tend to create situations like this, kind of inherently or structurally? That’s what’s happening, right?
Saunders: Yeah, the combination of the trends in presidential power long before Trump—but really since 9/11, where Congress is delegating all its power to the president—plus Trump’s intimidation tactics and sort of total control through fear of the Republican Party, has essentially meant that the last gasp of constraint that you could have on a President Trump is his inner circle.
In the second term, he’s entirely surrounded by yes-men and yes-women. And so structurally, it’s not so much that they’re pushing him toward war—it’s that there’s nothing to restrain his impulses anymore.
Sargent: And that leads to the other piece of the Times reporting, which is that Trump officials got caught off guard by Iran’s ability to create a global energy crisis, and also that they lack a clear strategy to end the war. Those things are kind of connected. The crisis is putting the U.S. in a bad spot, but we can’t extricate ourselves. Why not? In other words, can we extricate ourselves or not?
Saunders: The lack of a plan to extricate ourselves—this is a recurrent theme in history, right? We are the big power with the best military equipment; no one disputes that. But it is very hard to use that to change a regime, to make good on what for the other party is existential—to get them to surrender something that they consider completely central to their existence.
That’s why North Korea was never going to give up its nukes. Iran was never going to give up its ballistic missiles. Maybe they would have compromised on the nuclear. But apparently the diplomats weren’t smart enough—Witkoff and Kushner weren’t smart enough to understand what they were getting as an offer from the Iranians on the nuclear front.
But Vietnam, Afghanistan—you could make a list of all the countries that have failed to use their superior military power against a determined, militarily inferior enemy who just has to last, right? This is also George Washington’s strategy against the British in the Revolutionary War—we didn’t invent it, but the U.S. knows both sides of this. And if nobody told him that, that’s malpractice. If they did and he went ahead anyway—I mean, he doesn’t have any grasp of history. He just thinks he can make it so.
So then he gets the question: can we extricate ourselves? With the tariffs, he could say 20 percent tariff today and then back off, right? Leaving aside the illegality of doing that. And he clearly thinks that is what will happen here—that he can just choose the moment where he wants to undo this and go back to the way it was. Leaving aside all the other reasons why that’s probably not possible—such as trust in the U.S., the Israelis might not be ready to stop—just assume all those problems are solvable. What you have now is the Strait of Hormuz has become militarized in a way that it wasn’t before. It’s not clear that Iran will stop shooting if they feel it’s necessary for them to keep the war going, for international reasons, for domestic reasons.
And so the world cannot unsee that. Global markets can’t unsee that. Ship captains can’t unsee that. So it’s not clear to me that he can make the shooting stop by magic. It’s not clear to me that if the shooting stops, you would immediately see traffic through the Strait of Hormuz go back to normal. I think you’re going to have a Trump premium on the oil coming through the Strait of Hormuz for a long time.
Sargent: Can you see a scenario by which this war ends? Is there some way that he—I don’t know, in the next week or two or the next few days maybe—says something like, okay, they’ve unconditionally surrendered? They haven’t said that, but they’ve unconditionally surrendered in the sense that we have debilitated their forces enough that they can’t do anything to us anymore—so we’re going to pull out. Is there a scenario like that?
Saunders: I think that Trump thinks that there is. I think he thinks he can stop shooting and then everybody will take their toys and go home. One could argue that that’s impossible for all the reasons we’ve already discussed—that Iran may have its own reasons to want to punish the Gulf states that hosted all these American bombers and so forth, and really show the world it still is around and means business.
You can’t unsee what’s happened in the Strait of Hormuz. But there’s another, less obvious reason why I really do not think such a scenario is possible. And that is that we have lost, at Trump and Marco Rubio’s hand, a huge amount of our diplomatic capacity. We do not have the expertise in the region. We don’t have the ambassadors in post in the region. We don’t have competent people at the level at the State Department that you need to go in and try to marshal allies and deal with some of these attacks on neighbors—Gulf partners that didn’t expect to be attacked and need reassurance.
There’s fallout from this terrible strike on the school that looks to be an error. I do believe it wasn’t intentional, although the way Trump has handled it has been pretty horrifying. But that will also have raised some concerns and sensitivities in the region—not just in Iran, right? It’s horrific. When stuff like that happens, you have to get your diplomats engaged. It’s a form of power; it’s not a weakness. Diplomacy is not the opposite of war—it’s part of how you fight a war and how you end a war. And so I don’t think that there’s a scenario where Trump can unilaterally declare that the war is over.
Sargent: Well, Elizabeth, you mentioned the school. The Times also reports that an ongoing military investigation has concluded that the U.S. is responsible for blowing up the Iranian school—it had scores of children in it. Confirm this is the worst U.S. atrocity directed at civilians in decades. Is it not?
Trump was asked about this conclusion and he said he didn’t know about it, which is odd because you’d think he’d want to know about it. Elizabeth, how do you think about this part of it in the larger context here? And to wrap up—how do we get out of this?
Saunders: If I knew that I would be trading oil futures right now. So the answer to that is: I do not know.
On the school—it’s a horrendous tragedy, and not to minimize it in the slightest. I do think mistakes happen in war, and this is a particularly brutal and tragic mistake because it involves young, innocent schoolchildren. It just makes me shudder every time I even think about it. But as with any situation like this, it’s how you handle it afterwards that really matters. Not only is he not trying to mitigate the fallout—he’s pouring fuel on the fire by implying somehow it was Iran that got Tomahawks. But where would they have gotten the Tomahawks from? It makes no sense. It’s just transparently—I don’t even want to say a lie, because it’s more like he’s just making it up, right?
He did finally say, at the end of one of the press conferences I saw—maybe yesterday—that if they do an investigation, he’ll accept that. I don’t think he’ll have any choice but to implicitly accept that. But again, he’s making a terrible, terrible situation worse, and his inability to conduct any sort of diplomacy at any level is harming his own ability to prosecute the war. He will have a harder time declaring victory and going home because he’s not using American diplomatic resources and in fact has dismantled them.
Sargent: Well, Elizabeth Saunders, your piece at the Good Authority website is all about that, and folks should check it out. Elizabeth, thank you so much for coming on. It was a great pleasure to talk to you.
Saunders: Thank you.