Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
And Trump just unleashed a bizarre tweet about the situation that underscores just how lost he truly is. One of our go-to guests on topics like this is international relations professor Nicholas Grossman, who recently argued that the Iran war is demonstrating to Trump the limits of sheer bullying—which Trump thinks can accomplish anything. We’re talking to him about all of it. Nick, good to have you on.
Sargent: So Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz, creating a global oil shock, which seems to have been anticipated by everybody except the commander in chief of the world’s most powerful military. The International Energy Agency just announced that this is causing, quote, “the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.” Nick, can you boil down what that really means?
This was the explicit thing that we saw coming. And by “we,” I mean the broad national security community. It is very likely that people inside the military and the national security establishment told this to the White House—whether Trump himself heard it, or didn’t listen, or others tried to tell him, who knows. But this was the exact reason why we said: yes, confront Iran, but in smarter ways, as opposed to this one thing. This is their big leverage—don’t play into it. And now the U.S. has, and it’s not going to clear up soon.
Grossman: So when it comes to the actual oil, there are problems with the oil industry itself in that the tankers aren’t moving, the supply depots are filling up, then they might have to reduce production and stop various wells—and those things are difficult to restart. They are costly. That takes some time. So there would be built-in delays almost no matter what. And that assumes that things clear up quickly—that either the U.S. stops right away, and even if the U.S. does that, Iran stops right away.
Sargent: Yeah. And so CNN reports that Trump officials themselves are starting to seriously panic about all this. The CNN report says those officials have “frantically” sought ways to ease the crisis—they’re exploring a whole bunch of options, like getting oil companies involved, things like that, unleashing reserves, that type of thing. Nick, what do you make of that panic? And also, when it really comes down to it, there’s not a whole lot the administration can do here. Isn’t that sort of the essence of the problem?
His initial reaction to COVID was to continue to praise China, to praise Xi, to say that it wasn’t really happening, to kind of just pretend it wasn’t. And then it became overwhelming—it overwhelmed him, the globe, and the country. And yeah, he lied about it in different ways, but still, everybody knew there was a pandemic and there were economic problems associated with it, no matter what he said. And this is a similar thing: it has gone beyond his control.
In attacking Iran so strongly, they created a situation that is out of their control. Iran gets a big say in how this goes. Israel of course gets a say in how this goes. Increasingly, the countries of the Gulf and others that Iran is attacking are going to be involved in saying how it goes. Other world powers—the longer this goes on, the more it is disrupting all of their economies—they’re going to have a say. And Iran has a particular position of military advantage by having so much land access to this narrow waterway, which is the only access point. Therefore, they can continue disrupting it for an indefinite amount of time.
And Iran at this point has a pretty strong incentive to make it so that the war is not only one that they manage to survive, but one that they can turn into a cautionary tale—where whenever, say, the U.S. or Israel thinks of trying it again, people in their countries, other countries around the world, and especially partners in the Gulf start saying, no, you remember what happened last time, don’t do it. So Iran is now partially in control of how this goes. Of course, the United States military is stronger, is able to destroy a lot of things in Iran, and has a big say in how it goes. But the overall events and the economic damage are out of Trump’s control and not something that he can bullshit his way through.
Trump had some really weird tweets about this. Earlier this week, he said that short-term price hikes are a very small price to pay for world peace, adding, “ONLY FOOLS WOULD THINK DIFFERENTLY.”
Then he said he’s heroically protecting us from Iran’s nukes and all that. Nick, we don’t make money when oil prices go up, do we? To me, this underscores just how lost he is on all of it.
And it’s going to, like I said, raise prices and reduce spending power for people on everything else, because most people need the energy that they currently consume. If you commute to work, you still have to pay the higher gas prices. If a business is shipping things, they still have to pay to ship in order to sell. And no, that’s not something he can bullshit his way through.
I thought that was some interesting stuff—because you may recall, Nick, that during the campaign, one of the most corrupt things that happened in the 2024 campaign is that Donald Trump met with a bunch of big oil people and essentially said, raise me a billion dollars for my campaign and I will carry out your whole wish list of policy demands. He essentially said, I will govern in your interests if you give me money.
But I see that more as a symptom of Trump having no real idea why the United States is doing this. There is no articulation of a goal. You can contrast this even with the war in Iraq—for all its many problems, the Bush administration said that the United States was going to do regime change by force, was going to remove Saddam Hussein, was going to install a democracy. There’d be an elected government. The U.S. would train the security services and leave. And again, I don’t want to downplay the problems at all—that is broadly what happened, and the U.S. put in the ground force that could accomplish something like that. There is none of that here, so little of the planning.
Sargent: I think that’s really the essence of this—his inability to control things. In a funny way, you’re actually kind of seeing the revenge of an interdependent world. On some level, Donald Trump, as you wrote, just thinks he can bully his way toward accomplishing anything, to the degree that he even has goals, right?
Grossman: It seems like this is the point where they really did push things beyond their limits.
And there’s a pretty good antecedent of it with Trump’s cheering of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—when it first happened, he was clearly impressed. In an interview, he called it savvy. He called it genius. He said Putin’s move is wonderful. All those direct quotes, anybody can look them up. And what that reflected, I think, was that he expected it to work. It wasn’t just his normal Putin affinity, Russia affinity—he really thought it was going to work. And Ukraine managing to stand up to Russia, or even NATO and Denmark responding and standing up to the United States, Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum standing up to the United States—whenever this happens, they seem somewhat genuinely surprised.
Sargent: This idea that Trump doesn’t anticipate pushback is quite interesting. I think you actually saw this in Minneapolis in a funny way, right? You probably saw the viral pictures online which showed the woman in slippers and a bathrobe filming ICE with her little cell phone. And that I think really captured what you’re talking about. I think that Stephen Miller clearly thought that if he went out and just started beating the shit out of immigrants with his paramilitary thugs, people would just sort of roll over and accept that.
Grossman: Absolutely. I think that it applies to Minneapolis really well. I think when they run into reality and find that the enemy is just regular people trying to live their lives—for example, a community where some people are immigrants and some people aren’t and they all more or less get along, in the normal community sense—they get surprised and they don’t really know what to do except maybe lash out more. And it might be the case that that also contributed to going to war more abroad, in that the use of violence at home was running into more difficulties than they had expected.
Sargent: Yeah, absolutely. So just to close this out briefly—where do you think this goes from here? How do you anticipate it unfolding over the next month, two months, three months? There’s a scenario where Trump tries to declare victory and go home—I don’t know if that’s going to happen or not. What do you think is going to happen? Like, if he were to do that, would he be able to extricate us from the situation in the Strait of Hormuz and the global mess he’s creating—nevermind the absolute humanitarian catastrophe he leaves behind? What’s your reading on what’s coming?
Now, that said, I can see everything from it ending pretty quickly—maybe as the economic damage spreads, it becomes clear that any sort of manipulation, like, hey, we almost have victory—which he tried a day ago, and it did seem to make markets bounce back for a very brief amount of time—can’t overcome the reality of the situation. And then maybe Trump says, okay, I’ll try to lie my way to claiming victory, saying there was great damage. And maybe then Israel goes along with that thinking, okay, it was a bigger version of the 12-day war and we weakened Iran a lot. And maybe even Iran says, okay, you know what, as long as we survived and we made our point and now everybody knows we have more leverage, okay, we’ll all stop.
It also could go on for months, in one fashion or another. It could escalate to the United States introducing some ground troops, saying that is the only possible way to open the Strait of Hormuz. If it doesn’t work—if Iran doesn’t back down from cutting off that oil access—then we might see American, and perhaps even European and other forces try to force it open, and the war could still be going months from now. So I really don’t know. I just know that there is absolutely no path forward from here that is not highly disruptive and leaves things worse off than before he made this decision.
Grossman: Yep. Thanks for having me.
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