Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
Saunders: If I knew that I would be trading oil futures right now. So the answer to that is: I do not know.
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.
Saunders: Thank you.
Hence then, the article about transcript trump s war takes unnerving turn as damning new leaks hit was published today ( ) and is available on The New Republic ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Transcript: Trump’s War Takes Unnerving Turn as Damning New Leaks Hit )
Also on site :
- Asia rolls out four-day weeks and work-from-home as emergency measures to solve a fuel crisis caused by Iran war
- Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits and Others Remember Shane MacGowan With Tribute Album ‘20th Century Paddy’
- Security to Be Increased at 2026 Oscars Amid FBI Alert About Iran’s “Surprise Attack” Plan on California