Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Josh vs the News: Trump Cancels "Project Freedom!"

Transcript

Josh vs the News: Trump Cancels "Project Freedom!" · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:02
  G'day humans!
• 0:05
  Project Freedom, it's off.
• 0:07
  We're not going to be free anymore.
• 0:08
  Or we're free.
• 0:09
  We're free.
• 0:10
  The ships in the Strait of Hormuz may not be free.
• 0:13
  I don't know if you've caught this latest breaking news coming across the transom,
• 0:18
  but apparently President Trump's guarantee that he would change the stakes of what's going on in the Straits of Hormuz
• 0:26
  by escorting civilian vessels that are stuck.
• 0:31
  They're currently stuck in the...
• 0:32
  I hadn't really thought about this.
• 0:33
  Had you thought about this?
• 0:35
  When they closed the strait, not everybody was out.
• 0:38
  So there are still a whole bunch of ships
• 0:40
  that are inside the Gulf.
• 0:43
  That's the Persian Gulf,
• 0:44
  for those of you following along at home on your bingo cards.
• 0:47
  The Persian Gulf, there were still ships
• 0:49
  that were stranded there,
• 0:50
  and they've just been sitting there.
• 0:51
  I mean, the crews are literally just sitting on these ships.
• 0:54
  man I would not want to be in the you know what do they call the part of the ship the belly of
• 0:58
  the ship where all the crew live that would be getting a little smelly by now so they wanted to
• 1:03
  escort these ships out through the the Strait of Hormuz and Trump had said uh we're launching a new
• 1:10
  mission Project Freedom we're going to escort the ships uh it wasn't clear exactly how they were
• 1:15
  going to do that they got a few a small handful of ships out I think four and now it's off that's
• 1:20
  the latest breaking news here from the New York Times.
• 1:23
  I'm bringing it to you live, ladies and
• 1:26
  gents.
• 1:27
  They transitioned from Operation Epic Fury, which was the combat operations, to Project
• 1:34
  Freedom, in part so they didn't have to get congressional approval for the war, which they
• 1:39
  claim is now over, even though everybody who knows anything about international law says that a
• 1:44
  blockade is itself an act of war.
• 1:45
  So you're still at war as long as you're blockading another country.
• 1:48
  But President Trump announced on Tuesday evening, that's right now, even though it's Wednesday morning here, President Trump just announced that he was pausing the one-day-old U.S. operation to escort commercial ships through the Strait of Hormuz, quote, for a short period of time.
• 2:09
  he made this announcement in a social media post it was only hours after the secretary of state
• 2:14
  marco rubio said the united states had concluded combat operations against iran and was fully
• 2:20
  focused on the new mission fully focused the secretary of state said we are we have a laser
• 2:26
  like focus on this new mission project freedom he was briefing reporters at the white house
• 2:33
  this was the same day the same day today the secretary of state briefs reporters at the white
• 2:40
  house and he says and i quote the operation is over epic fury as the president notified congress
• 2:47
  we're done with that stage of it we're now on to this project of freedom which was going to be the
• 2:53
  escorting of civilian ships out of the persian gulf through the strait of hormuz and then literally
• 2:59
  hours later, Donald Trump gets on social media and he shoots down his own Secretary of State
• 3:04
  and says, nope, Project Freedom is being suspended for a short period of time.
• 3:13
  So the reporters asked the US Central Command, what does this mean exactly?
• 3:17
  Is it on?
• 3:18
  Is it off?
• 3:18
  And the spokesman just referred questions to the White House.
• 3:23
  It was unclear always whether or not Project Freedom was actually going to amount to anything,
• 3:27
  because if you're a civilian ship, you don't really want to be a test case for whether the
• 3:31
  war is over.
• 3:33
  I mean, if you're going to be escorted, you want a couple of big aircraft
• 3:38
  carriers on either side of you just laden to the brim with anti-aircraft artillery and anti-drones
• 3:46
  and things like that.
• 3:47
  But that wasn't what was happening.
• 3:48
  That wasn't what was happening in
• 3:50
  Project Freedom.
• 3:51
  Project Freedom seems to have entailed the US Navy sitting at a safe distance
• 3:56
  from the civilian ships and telling them where they think the mines aren't, the shipping mines
• 4:02
  that Iran has laid, and saying, good luck to you, a little to the left, you might want to avoid,
• 4:09
  nope, yep, straight ahead, no, no, warmer, warmer, colder, colder, cold, cold, cold.
• 4:17
  And the civilian ships were like, I don't think we need this kind of risk.
• 4:21
  I don't think we need
• 4:22
  to be pawns in your game.
• 4:23
  We'd rather just sit here and smell our own shit for a little more,
• 4:26
  for a few more weeks until the Iranians tell us we can go through.
• 4:30
  So it wasn't a great success,
• 4:31
  Project Freedom, but it did last for a day.
• 4:34
  So it's got that going for it.
• 4:38
  But I got to pull
• 4:39
  back a little bit and just see where we are in Iran.
• 4:42
  Because I got to say, I don't know about
• 4:45
  you, but this whole thing, it gives me the heebie-jeebies.
• 4:50
  It gives me the heebie-jeebies.
• 4:52
  because I'm not sure that,
• 4:55
  far be it from me to question the wisdom
• 4:56
  of the president of the United States,
• 4:58
  but I'm not sure he's entirely across what he's doing.
• 5:02
  I don't think he has a perfectly
• 5:05
  well thought through exit plan.
• 5:09
  I wrote as much in the Australian Financial Review.
• 5:11
  Did you know that I'm a columnist now?
• 5:13
  If you haven't heard the recent episode yesterday
• 5:15
  with Jimmy Carr, it's not only very funny,
• 5:18
  it's also very insightful,
• 5:19
  but he does give me shit for my pronunciation
• 5:22
  of the word columnist, columnist.
• 5:26
  And you should definitely go back
• 5:27
  and listen to my wonderful conversation
• 5:29
  with Jimmy Carr,
• 5:30
  lovely guy, absolute mensch
• 5:33
  and insightful as well.
• 5:35
  But as I told him,
• 5:36
  I'm now a columnist.
• 5:38
  I'm never going to be able
• 5:39
  to say the word properly again.
• 5:41
  A columnist
• 5:43
  for the Australian Financial Review,
• 5:44
  Australia's most prestigious paper.
• 5:46
  Love them.
• 5:47
  Go and subscribe.
• 5:48
  Show them a little support
• 5:49
  because they're the only place left
• 5:50
  that's doing real impartial journalism.
• 5:55
  So every other weekend,
• 5:57
  I have a column on the op-ed page.
• 5:59
  And this is, I wanted to read to you
• 6:01
  the most recent one, okay?
• 6:03
  Because I'm going to start releasing these columns
• 6:04
  two weeks after they're published in the paper
• 6:07
  on my sub stack.
• 6:08
  So you will get to see them.
• 6:10
  Unfortunately, they are paywalled
• 6:12
  on the Fin Reviews site,
• 6:14
  but I have permission to read it.
• 6:16
  What are they going to sue me?
• 6:17
  What are they going to sue me
• 6:18
  for reading out my own words
• 6:20
  on my own damn podcast.
• 6:21
  Let's see you try it.
• 6:23
  Let's see you try it.
• 6:25
  Don't know why I'm getting
• 6:26
  so hot under the collar about that.
• 6:28
  An eventuality that they haven't even proposed.
• 6:31
  In fact, they
• 6:32
  told me I could read it out.
• 6:34
  But you know, you're going to get the clicks.
• 6:36
  And I think I get the
• 6:37
  clicks by amping up the drama a little bit, you know, like Josh against the machine, Josh against
• 6:43
  the people, the big wigs who want to silence him.
• 6:46
  You can't silence me.
• 6:48
  Even the people who aren't
• 6:49
  trying to silence me.
• 6:51
  You couldn't silence me even if you wanted to, which you don't.
• 6:54
  Opinion.
• 6:55
  Josh Zapps, columnist.
• 6:59
  I wanted to entitle the article, and for those of you who
• 7:05
  are in the know about the way that newspaper publishing works, the journalist doesn't get
• 7:10
  to write the title.
• 7:12
  The sub-editor writes the title.
• 7:13
  But I suggested to them, you should call
• 7:16
  the title of the piece, We Sure Are Lucky the Iranians Don't Know About the Midterms.
• 7:22
  That was what I wanted to call it.
• 7:24
  But wiser heads prevailed, and they called it,
• 7:26
  Mullers Have Trump Over Oil Barrel, Iran Deal Could Be Worse Than Obama's.
• 7:32
  And it's subtitled,
• 7:33
  Imagine Knowing the Exact Date by Which the Other Guy Has to End the Conflict and Get Petrol Prices
• 7:39
  down or face electoral annihilation by Josh Sepp's columnist.
• 7:43
  So I'll just read this out and then we
• 7:46
  can talk about it, okay?
• 7:48
  Or I can talk about it and you can chat to me in the chat comments and
• 7:51
  I'll read them out on the air if they're not stupid.
• 7:54
  Six months from this Sunday, American
• 7:58
  voters will elect a new House of Representatives and one third of the US Senate.
• 8:04
  Now that the
• 8:04
  President's war on Iran has bogged down into a standoff in the Strait of Hormuz,
• 8:10
  where Tehran and Trump hope to choke the other and the rest of us until one of them blinks,
• 8:17
  we sure are lucky the Iranians don't know about the midterms.
• 8:22
  I mean, imagine knowing the exact date by which the other guy has to end the conflict
• 8:28
  and get petrol prices down, or he faces electoral annihilation.
• 8:32
  Imagine knowing exactly how long he can hold out.
• 8:37
  And imagine knowing that he knows you know that.
• 8:41
  Why, you'd be one happy muller.
• 8:45
  Like all games of chicken, I write,
• 8:48
  the Hormuz stalemate depends on each side's ignorance of the other's endurance.
• 8:55
  It works if your adversary believes that no matter how long they hold out,
• 9:01
  you'll hold out one day longer.
• 9:05
  Strangely, merely knowing your opponent's deadline
• 9:08
  is almost as useful, strategically,
• 9:11
  as if they surrendered tomorrow.
• 9:13
  You don't need to see them blink.
• 9:15
  You just need to know when they will.
• 9:19
  Iran, I write, if you're just tuning in,
• 9:22
  I'm reading in my latest piece from the Australian Financial Review,
• 9:25
  which we are about to discuss in depth,
• 9:28
  in this little study group,
• 9:29
  or study group we've got going here.
• 9:32
  Iran, I write, would still endure tremendous hardship in the meantime, of course,
• 9:36
  but if the regime knew its hand would grow stronger every day
• 9:40
  until, say, for example, oh, I don't know, November 4th,
• 9:46
  then why concede much?
• 9:49
  The final capitulator is known.
• 9:52
  That's why we're so lucky the Iranians don't know about the midterms.
• 9:59
  Right now, all of us are living on borrowed time
• 10:02
  Two weeks ago, the last tankers to cross the strait reached their destinations
• 10:08
  Shipping through the strait has collapsed by 97%
• 10:12
  Hormuz normally carries about a quarter of the world's seaborne oil
• 10:16
  and one-fifth of its liquefied natural gas
• 10:20
  If it stays closed for months, the entire global fuel system is likely to seize up
• 10:28
  Our region is particularly vulnerable.
• 10:31
  Asia used to receive 80% of Persian Gulf oil exports.
• 10:37
  Strategic reserves are running out.
• 10:40
  Japan's will be exhausted this month.
• 10:42
  China has suspended exports of refined products.
• 10:46
  The Australian budget hasn't faced this kind of uncertainty since COVID-19.
• 10:52
  Stagflation, the nastiest double bind in economics, stalks us.
• 10:58
  oh Mr Chalmers
• 11:00
  what a mess
• 11:01
  Mr Chalmers is the treasurer of Australia
• 11:04
  who next week is handing down the Australian budget
• 11:06
  which is kind of like the
• 11:08
  I suppose like the state of the union
• 11:09
  in a way in Australia
• 11:10
  it sets out the government's priorities for the year
• 11:12
  gives an update on where the country is at
• 11:16
  I'm just reading my latest piece from the Financial Review
• 11:18
  in order to articulate my concerns
• 11:21
  more perhaps eloquently than I could off the cuff
• 11:25
  about what's going on in Iran
• 11:28
  I continue, the mess gets worse if it ends in a face-saving deal
• 11:34
  If, for example, Iran softens its nuclear demands
• 11:38
  but quietly keeps the keys to the Strait
• 11:41
  Quote, the Strait of Hormuz will certainly reopen
• 11:44
  the Iranian Parliament Commission's chief, Ebrahim Azizi, has said
• 11:50
  but not for the US, it will open only for those who comply with the new laws of Iran
• 11:58
  And then I write
• 11:59
  Without a genuine mechanism to secure oil and gas traffic
• 12:02
  the Islamic Republic could someday coerce Japan, Australia and Europe
• 12:07
  to lift sanctions in exchange for sweet, sweet crude
• 12:11
  That's a bigger strategic win
• 12:13
  even than keeping their nuclear program
• 12:16
  Nukes aren't very useful
• 12:20
  Holding worldwide energy markets hostage is
• 12:24
  It's a good thing Mr. Azizi doesn't know when Mr. Trump's clock runs out
• 12:30
  When President Obama made a deal with Iran in 2015 to curtail its nuclear program
• 12:35
  Trump called it
• 12:37
  quote
• 12:37
  Trump hates being bested by Obama
• 12:50
  Well, good news, Mr. President
• 12:52
  let's see what Tehran offers you to declare victory and leave as election day approaches.
• 12:58
  You might out Obama Obama yet.
• 13:02
  Of course, Trump isn't just going to lose a war just to placate a bunch of la-di-da foreign allies
• 13:07
  who whine about petty nonsense like food prices and interest rates and keeping the lights on and not starving.
• 13:17
  He's a winner, not a loser like us.
• 13:20
  The problem is, American motorists are furious
• 13:25
  His Republican Party colleagues are pounding on the Oval Office door with their hair on fire
• 13:32
  For voters to see lower pump prices by Election Day
• 13:36
  tankers need to be flowing through Hormuz by early September
• 13:41
  Democrats are already favoured to take the House
• 13:44
  If they can also pick up four upper house seats to control the Senate
• 13:49
  Trump will face investigations from newly formed committees
• 13:54
  with subpoena powers staffed by his enemies.
• 13:58
  They will turn over rocks Trump would rather leave unturned.
• 14:03
  Flipping the Senate is a long shot,
• 14:06
  but less so if a paralysed global supply chain pushes inflation to COVID-era highs.
• 14:12
  It sure is a good thing the Iranians don't know all this.
• 14:18
  Of course, I write, and I'm just reading a piece from the Australian Financial Review
• 14:21
  If you're just tuning in my latest column
• 14:23
  In order to spark some conversation about where exactly we are with Iran
• 14:26
  And try to make sense of this whole schmuzzle
• 14:29
  Of course, I write, Trump has other ways to bully Tehran
• 14:34
  He could repeat his threat to kill the Iranian people's whole civilization
• 14:38
  Never to be brought back again
• 14:40
  But, short of genocide, what else can he do?
• 14:45
  Bomb their nuclear program?
• 14:47
  Decapitate the leadership?
• 14:49
  Launch an air war?
• 14:51
  He's already done all that
• 14:53
  That's why blockades are most effective at the start of a conflict
• 14:57
  Where there's headroom to escalate
• 14:59
  Without that, you need time to starve them out
• 15:05
  Trump has neither
• 15:08
  The pain of all this, of course, won't be borne by Trump
• 15:12
  Or even mostly by Americans
• 15:14
  it might be born by schoolchildren in Romania returning to farming
• 15:19
  because there's no diesel for irrigation pumps,
• 15:22
  or by a surgeon in Greece operating by the light of a phone torch,
• 15:27
  or a flour exporter in Nairobi watching her harvest rot on the runway,
• 15:33
  a family in Karachi queuing for seven hours for cooking gas,
• 15:38
  a Chilean fishing family with no diesel for their boat,
• 15:42
  a hospital in Tonga on emergency protocols due to brownouts,
• 15:47
  or a remote Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory
• 15:50
  with no water from their empty diesel water pumps.
• 15:55
  See, I write, it sure is a good thing the Iranians don't know about the midterms.
• 16:03
  Because if they did, the next six months could look really, really bad.
• 16:11
  so that was my piece and it articulates better than i probably could ad lib uh my worries which
• 16:20
  are growing uh they weren't small to begin with but i don't quite understand what incentive the
• 16:27
  iranians have to come to the party on making sure that the strait is free in perpetuity for um
• 16:36
  for sea traffic.
• 16:37
  Like, if they know that Trump is tired of the war, like rule number one in
• 16:42
  negotiation, Mr. President, didn't you write the art of the deal?
• 16:46
  Aren't you supposed to be a
• 16:48
  genius at negotiating?
• 16:50
  Maybe he needs the other guy in the room.
• 16:52
  Maybe he needs to be able to
• 16:53
  look into his eyes or something.
• 16:55
  Because the Iranians have defined themselves, this regime,
• 17:02
  which believe it or not Mr President
• 17:03
  is still the same regime
• 17:05
  it's not like regime change hasn't taken place
• 17:07
  because you killed a half a dozen guys
• 17:09
  and now the son of the former
• 17:12
  Fuhrer is in charge
• 17:15
  they've defined
• 17:15
  themselves for decades on their tenacity
• 17:18
  their resilience, their ability to outlast
• 17:21
  that's really
• 17:22
  their main strong suit
• 17:24
  that's how they get through
• 17:26
  life with sanctions being thrown
• 17:27
  at them and just persistently
• 17:29
  chipping away like a Chinese water torture where they just wear down the world until the world
• 17:36
  just stops caring for a while and they keep chugging along with their little nuclear program
• 17:39
  and chugging along with funding terrorism and the hooties and the Hezbollah.
• 17:45
  And they just bank on
• 17:47
  other people having less patience than they do.
• 17:50
  So if you're a fast and quick fly-by-night real
• 17:53
  estate tycoon from New York City who has a short attention span and likes quick wins,
• 17:58
  you're not necessarily you know you don't have the strongest hand when you're coming to extremely
• 18:03
  patient and rather internecine bureaucratic systems run by people who prize time tenacity
• 18:13
  resilience and patience so we find ourselves in this standoff which isn't really much of a
• 18:18
  standoff because one side essentially has all the time in the in the world and the other side needs
• 18:23
  it wrapped up quickly.
• 18:24
  A terrible place to be if you're in a game of chicken or a battle of
• 18:27
  wills.
• 18:29
  As I said in the piece, merely knowing that the other guy is hasty to find a conclusion
• 18:35
  is almost as good as knowing the other person will fold tomorrow, because all you have to do
• 18:38
  is endure whatever pain you have to in the meantime, knowing that eventually he's going
• 18:43
  to come to you with his orange face on fire, his pompadour trickling sweat onto his orange makeup,
• 18:51
  begging for a deal, or he's going to blow you up and nuke you, which also is probably a price
• 18:58
  worth paying, but you don't really believe that he's going to do that anyway.
• 19:02
  And in the meantime,
• 19:03
  the pain that Iran suffers is intense, but for them it's an existential threat and the regime
• 19:08
  doesn't care about its people anyway, so what's it to them whether or not they have to endure
• 19:11
  another four months of agony after, you know, it's a point of pride almost, like we're going
• 19:18
  to be able to endure this and we're going to be able to come out the other side stronger.
• 19:23
  And we're going to be able to come out the other side with a bargaining chip and a strategic asset
• 19:28
  that we never had in the past.
• 19:30
  And when we thought that a nuclear weapon would put us on another
• 19:33
  level, we had no idea that controlling one fifth of the world's seaborne oil and one quarter of
• 19:41
  its liquefied natural gas and having the ability to strike oil refineries and indeed civilian assets
• 19:50
  all across our enemies on the other side of the Gulf, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Saudi
• 19:54
  Arabia, Qatar, that that would now mean that essentially Iran is the dominant player in the
• 20:03
  region.
• 20:05
  How do you negotiate a settlement that actually involves some kind of international
• 20:09
  policing of the straight and mine clearing that in perpetuity guarantees free passage through
• 20:14
  those international waters free from molestation by the mullahs in tehran i don't know it would
• 20:20
  take a lot of patient diplomacy and if there's one person we know excels at patient diplomacy
• 20:28
  it's donald trump uh people commenting on the uh on the uh the substat comments uh doug says
• 20:35
  amazing backpedaling on his blockade.
• 20:38
  However, Rubio did say they torpedoed about five or six
• 20:41
  of the Iranian speedboats.
• 20:43
  So there's that.
• 20:44
  There's that.
• 20:45
  So my hint to you is if you're
• 20:48
  vacationing in Iran and somebody suggests doing a parasailing adventure behind a speedboat,
• 20:55
  postpone it because Rubio's out there with his shotgun.
• 21:01
  He's taken out the speedboats.
• 21:03
  Errol says, isn't there an argument that once Iran runs out of storage for their oil overflow
• 21:07
  and they have to start shutting down their wells
• 21:11
  then they'll begin to suffer much more long-term damage
• 21:13
  because those wells can't just start back up as easy as they stop
• 21:17
  I'm also wondering if the government may end up subsidizing oil for Americans
• 21:20
  to offer some immediate relief just in time for elections
• 21:24
  Both good points, Errol
• 21:25
  On the latter point, yes, America could subsidize petrol if this dragged out
• 21:32
  through to the election, it would be incredibly expensive.
• 21:37
  I mean, if this lasts until September,
• 21:39
  oil is already nudging $5 a gallon in the United States, which is higher than it's ever been in
• 21:44
  the history of the world in nominal terms in the US.
• 21:47
  If it lasts until September and petrol or gas,
• 21:50
  as you call it, is $6 or $7 a gallon, what kind of budgetary hit does the US federal budget have
• 22:00
  to take to bring $6 a gas down to $4 or $3 again.
• 22:04
  I mean, that's an extraordinary act of socialism,
• 22:09
  essentially.
• 22:09
  And it's hard to imagine a Republican Congress signing off on it,
• 22:12
  even if Trump wanted it.
• 22:13
  Maybe they would to save their hides, but I think everybody would
• 22:16
  see it as a cynical ploy, even wavering Republican voters.
• 22:22
  And on Errol's other point,
• 22:23
  isn't there an argument that once Iran runs out of storage for their oil overflow and has to start
• 22:27
  shutting down the wells that they suffer much more long-term damage.
• 22:30
  Yes, I think that is true.
• 22:31
  And they've been scrambling to put oil wherever they possibly can.
• 22:34
  They've been grabbing old
• 22:36
  tankers that they're no longer using and shoving oil into them and parking them off their coast.
• 22:41
  They've been putting them wherever they can.
• 22:43
  People's basements just full of oil.
• 22:46
  Yes,
• 22:46
  you've got to put the oil somewhere and then you shut them down and then it's hard to start
• 22:49
  them back up.
• 22:51
  But honestly, when you look at the damage that they can inflict on the rest of the
• 22:56
  world versus the damage that they can endure, knowing that they're not a democracy, so they
• 23:00
  don't have to really give a shit about whether or not their people can't afford food.
• 23:04
  They just
• 23:05
  have to stay in power.
• 23:06
  I mean, if the unrest and the dissatisfaction amongst the Iranian people
• 23:12
  with the regime was not sufficient to topple the regime during the course of the various
• 23:18
  uprisings that we've seen, and then in the wake of the initial Israeli and American bombardment,
• 23:24
  it's hard to imagine it becoming sufficient simply because petrol and food got expensive
• 23:31
  in the next few months.
• 23:33
  So assuming that the regime stays in power, assuming that the regime
• 23:36
  doesn't give a shit about its people, and assuming that the regime is always going to find ways to
• 23:40
  fund itself with the help of the Russians and others, I don't think it necessarily matters if
• 23:46
  there's long-term damage to the Iranian economy if they regard this as an existential threat to
• 23:51
  the country, and they think that it's worth enduring any short-term pain in order to turn
• 23:57
  this into a long-term strategic win in which they can basically hold a bargaining chip with which to
• 24:02
  coerce and cajole the rest of the world.
• 24:05
  You also have to remember that while Donald Trump is,
• 24:08
  you know, we think about this game of brinksmanship as between Trump on one side alongside American
• 24:15
  gas prices, and then on the other side, the Iranians and how much pain they can endure.
• 24:21
  But Americans have to understand, the rest of the world is much more vulnerable than the United States is.
• 24:28
  The United States is a net petroleum exporter.
• 24:31
  The United States will suffer with high gas prices, and that will basically be the end of it.
• 24:38
  There's all kinds of other knock-on consequences for the rest of the world.
• 24:41
  I mean, here in the Asia-Pacific, it's much, much more dicey.
• 24:45
  As I mentioned in that article, if there is simply not enough diesel to go around through South Pacific island nations, which they run their electricity on diesel generators, there's all kinds of other components that are coming out of the Middle East, including things like helium and some strange element whose name escapes me that is used in the production of microchips that Taiwan needs.
• 25:13
  we're going to see you know it's going to make the covid financial problems look like a walk
• 25:21
  in the park in the sense that we're currently still living in this state of suspended animation
• 25:26
  where we're going through the last of our reserves and sort of we're living on borrowed time but
• 25:31
  things need to change right now like oil needs to start getting out of that straight right now for
• 25:36
  there not to be a cataclysmic financial crisis as a result.
• 25:42
  In America, it'll just be felt in
• 25:43
  higher petrol prices.
• 25:44
  In other parts of the world, it'll be felt in literally people's lives and
• 25:48
  livelihoods.
• 25:49
  And so Americans may think that Trump can endure a certain amount of electoral pain in
• 25:55
  order to save face.
• 25:57
  But what is China going to do?
• 26:00
  What is India going to do?
• 26:01
  What is Brazil going to
• 26:02
  do what is the european union going to do if this drags on for long enough that there is genuine
• 26:08
  civil unrest and a genuine national security threat due to a true lack of electricity and a
• 26:16
  true lack of energy um i'm not saying that they're going to go in and invade but they're going to
• 26:22
  pull every lever that they possibly can to force the americans to concede in some way and to reopen
• 26:31
  that strait.
• 26:31
  It's just mind-boggling to me that reopening that strait has not been a number one
• 26:38
  military necessity as far as the Trump administration is concerned, and that they
• 26:43
  didn't do initially whatever they had to do to get control of the strait, even if that meant a land
• 26:48
  invasion of that entire portion of Iran in order to abolish all of the forward assets that Iran
• 26:57
  could use to fire on ships.
• 27:01
  You know, if you're going to take a shot at the king, be sure not to
• 27:04
  miss.
• 27:05
  Don't like dilly-dally and then find yourself in a quagmire.
• 27:11
  The other thing to say, of course,
• 27:12
  and we have to get out of here in a few moments, but be sure to leave comments in the comment well
• 27:17
  if you're so inclined, is it's difficult to think about exactly how Donald Trump comes out of this.
• 27:26
  Like, what are the exact things that the Iranians could offer Donald Trump that would allow him to call it a victory, even if it was merely as good as the deal that Obama got in 2015 without spending billions of dollars on, you know, a misbegotten war?
• 27:46
  could they provide some they could provide a lot of assurances they could provide a lot of
• 27:50
  signatures on a piece of paper that says yes don't worry we're going to make sure that the
• 27:55
  straight remains open but donald trump has been sufficiently savvy to know that it's not necessary
• 28:02
  that you shouldn't take the iranians word for things when it comes to the nuclear program
• 28:06
  he's been sufficiently savvy to say it's not good enough just to give us reassurances about
• 28:10
  the nuclear program, you actually have to export your nuclear material, which Trump amusingly calls
• 28:15
  nuclear dust.
• 28:16
  Nuclear dust.
• 28:18
  Where do you get dust from?
• 28:19
  I don't think it's dust.
• 28:21
  I don't think 400
• 28:22
  kilograms of highly enriched uranium is dust.
• 28:26
  Is it?
• 28:26
  Is it?
• 28:27
  I thought uranium was, isn't it a block?
• 28:29
  Isn't it a block of uranium?
• 28:30
  Maybe I don't know my nuclear physics well enough.
• 28:33
  I thought it was,
• 28:33
  I thought it was chunkier than dust.
• 28:35
  But anyway, they've got 400 kilos of this stuff and he's
• 28:37
  saying, well, okay, it's not good enough to tell us that you won't enrich it further.
• 28:43
  You have to
• 28:43
  actually ship it out of the country.
• 28:44
  Maybe half of it goes to Russia, half of it goes to other
• 28:47
  independent countries, or rather to independent countries, since Russia is not particularly
• 28:51
  independent when it comes to this conflict.
• 28:54
  And so why would he take their assurance that the
• 28:57
  strait is going to be open?
• 28:58
  He may just do it because it gives him an excuse to go home.
• 29:02
  And
• 29:02
  that leaves all the rest of us up shit creek without a paddle.
• 29:05
  Because America doesn't really
• 29:08
  need the Strait of Hormuz to be open, but most of the rest of the world desperately does.
• 29:14
  So there's some kind of even greater indignity about the fact that the man who has caused this
• 29:20
  crisis, and indeed the people who voted for the man who has caused this crisis, are insulated from
• 29:26
  the worst effects.
• 29:27
  And the worst effects, as is often the case, will fall upon people many thousands
• 29:32
  of miles from his shores.
• 29:36
  HS responds to Lara, to Errol rather, saying, Errol, Iranians don't
• 29:43
  mind the suffering to keep their pride in a war they know.
• 29:47
  Even most Americans agree with them,
• 29:48
  it's dumb and unjust.
• 29:51
  Also, they'll still have plenty of oil for their own domestic use.
• 29:54
  Export dollars used to bring them toys from China.
• 29:56
  They don't need that anymore.
• 29:58
  They produce everything they need or they can get from their neighbors and already made
• 30:02
  $6 billion in March, says HS on Substack.
• 30:06
  I remember Trump refusing to attack Iranian oil
• 30:08
  installations because he thought people will take over and he doesn't want to damage them.
• 30:12
  Now, if his dumb blockade causes permanent damage to Iranian oil wells, then why was he opposed to
• 30:17
  bombing it?
• 30:18
  It just shows the hallow nature of the concerns for the people of Iran.
• 30:22
  And Errol replies,
• 30:23
  I think no matter how bad the deal is, he'll say it's a victory, lie about what was agreed to,
• 30:27
  and his people will buy it and not read into it at all.
• 30:31
  And Mark writes, America is becoming an enemy to all.
• 30:34
  They have to do a deal on the uranium.
• 30:38
  I will leave you with my final thought,
• 30:41
  which is just how damaging this whole thing has been to America's reputation.
• 30:46
  I mean, if America started losing its sheen as the light on the hill
• 30:51
  that the world aspired to be like
• 30:53
  and the great benevolent superpower around the time of the Iraq War,
• 30:58
  or perhaps initially around the Vietnam War,
• 31:00
  but sort of regained it in the 90s with the fall of communism,
• 31:04
  and then took the luster off with the Iraq War,
• 31:08
  which was illegal under international law.
• 31:12
  Then Trump 1 really took a sledgehammer to America's reputation,
• 31:20
  And Trump, too, and the attacks on Canada and the bad-mouthing of European allies.
• 31:28
  And now this, I mean, you have to think of this as a nail in the coffin of America's reputation.
• 31:35
  it was tricky enough when america when donald trump pulled out of the jcpoa the obama trump
• 31:42
  the obama nuclear iran nuclear deal from 2015 because the it left the iranians who as i say
• 31:49
  have this very long-term patient deliberative process of of uh of ruling it left them thinking
• 31:57
  well what's the point never doing a deal with america if the next person who comes into power
• 32:00
  can just rip it up.
• 32:01
  We do a deal with Obama, and then what, a year later, President Trump just
• 32:08
  tears the deal up.
• 32:11
  Now, what possible deal can the Iranians do with the Americans that the Iranians
• 32:16
  won't just think is temporary anyway?
• 32:19
  The Americans are probably going to break it as far as they're
• 32:21
  concerned, because Americans always break deals.
• 32:23
  Donald Trump proved that with the Obama-Iran deal.
• 32:27
  and the Iranians are going to break it because the Iranians have no compunction about
• 32:30
  breaking deals when they can and they're going to gamble that if they do break it America isn't
• 32:35
  going to want to have do this all over again so it's a total clusterfuck six ways from Sunday
• 32:41
  you know not only is it a pickle that America is finding it difficult to get out of
• 32:46
  not only is it a stalemate that the rest of the world is about to pay a tremendous and costly
• 32:51
  price, not just in money, but in lives and in national security for.
• 32:57
  Not only is it a Chinese
• 32:58
  finger trap that is impossible to imagine a good resolution to in the short term, but it's also
• 33:06
  a way for Iran to know that America is not going to want a do-over of this, and that they can
• 33:13
  basically agree to whatever they have to agree to on paper, ensure that the enforcement mechanisms
• 33:17
  are not sufficiently rigorous that they can dodge them and then go ahead and dodge them,
• 33:21
  dodge whatever the deal is with impunity, daring America to come and do this all over again.
• 33:28
  It's immensely depressing.
• 33:29
  And I fear that even when it is over, it won't really be over
• 33:33
  because we've basically handed Iran an incredible strategic gift, which is suddenly awakening it
• 33:38
  to an asset that it didn't even know that it possessed, which is this extraordinary control
• 33:42
  over this vital waterway, and they will henceforth be able to bribe and cajole and influence medium-sized countries
• 33:50
  like Australia and Canada and Japan and the UK and European nations
• 33:56
  to be more pliant towards what Iran wants them to do, like lifting sanctions on them and so on,
• 34:03
  knowing that there's really nothing that we can do.
• 34:06
  We need their oil, we need their gas, and America isn't going to get punched in the nose again.
• 34:12
  through strategic defeat.
• 34:15
  Before I go, Jimmy Carr was on the show yesterday.
• 34:18
  A fabulous
• 34:20
  conversation.
• 34:20
  I really hope that you listen to it.
• 34:22
  Jimmy is a friend, a friend of the show,
• 34:26
  not only a terrific guy and not only obviously hilarious, but a very deep thinker about politics,
• 34:32
  about what's gone wrong with the United Kingdom, about what's going wrong with liberal democracy.
• 34:35
  And he's also quite chipper and optimistic about the prospect of a global revolution, which I can't say I am, but it's really nice and refreshing to sit down with someone that articulate.
• 34:47
  He's coming off the back of a multi-month long tour of Australia, and it was great to see him again, great to sit down with him again.
• 34:52
  Be sure to listen to that episode with Jimmy Carr.
• 34:55
  Now, tomorrow, sorry, rather Friday, will be David Moskrop, who's a Canadian academic and writer and public intellectual, who is super interesting about the question of basically nationalism in a world of Trump and in a world in which the planet is increasingly a dog-eat-dog world.
• 35:14
  Like, is it possible for a country, for a squishy, progressive, multiculturalist country like Australia or Canada or the United Kingdom to be nationalistic without being jingoistic and white supremacist, but to find ways of sort of cohering as a democracy of not, you know, ways for the left to be less censorious, for the right to be less militaristic and jingoistic, and for all of us to understand each other a little bit better and cohere around a common sense of identity?
• 35:45
  so that's a fascinating chat be sure to watch out for that I assume that you're a paid subscriber
• 35:52
  if you're watching this and I just want to say an enormous enormous thank you we can't do the
• 35:55
  show without you that's not just a way of saying this you know things are tight expenses are high
• 36:03
  we just make do with our after paying payroll on this show it's like the smell of an oily rag at
• 36:10
  the moment and 80% of our revenue comes from subscribers who choose to pay.
• 36:15
  So if you watch
• 36:16
  this and if you enjoy this and you haven't quite gotten around to subscribing, it makes a genuine
• 36:21
  difference.
• 36:21
  It is a vote for the kinds of conversations that you want to hear.
• 36:24
  And if
• 36:24
  you do subscribe, I thank you eternally for doing so.
• 36:29
  I hope you have a great day.
• 36:31
  Let's maybe hope
• 36:32
  that there's some divine intervention on the Strait of Hormuz because as I said in my piece,
• 36:37
  If there isn't, the next six months could look really, really bad.
• 36:44
  Have a great day!