Watching War From the Strait of Hormuz

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube

In this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his thoughts on the strange lack of information about the current war in Iran. He wonders why, despite the publicized tactical success of the United States’ campaign in Iran, the war seems to be progressing in an unfavorable way for the U.S.

Visit tr-sport.bond for more information.

Then David is joined by his colleague at The Atlantic Graeme Wood to discuss Graeme’s recent reporting from the Persian Gulf. David and Graeme talk about Graeme’s experiences being bombed in Dubai and snorkeling in the Strait of Hormuz. They also discuss what happens next in Iran, Trump’s failure in political messaging on the war, and the state of the global energy market.

David concludes with a discussion of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, which was published 250 years ago this year.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum: Hello, and welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Graeme Wood, my Atlantic colleague and author of two important recent articles in The Atlantic, one about Iran’s ability to continue to inflict economic damage on Saudi Arabia and the other oil-producing states, and the other, well, a really delightful piece called “Snorkeling in the Strait of Hormuz” about Graeme’s adventures going swimming in that body of water that is the center of the world’s attention. Graeme is a courageous, inventive, ingenious, and perceptive writer, and it’s a delight to be able to talk to him on The David Frum Show.

My book this week will be Common Sense, by Thomas Paine, published 250 years ago this year and worthy of urgent rereading on this anniversary occasion.

But before my discussion with either Graeme Wood or my reading of Common Sense, some preliminary thoughts about the war that continues to rage between the United States and Iran, now finishing its first month, entering month two.

We’re in a strange information blackout about the war. There is so much that we hear, so little that we see, and so little that we can know for sure. We don’t see the evidence of it, but from everything we read, the United States and Israel have inflicted devastating damage on Iranian military and economic targets. How fateful this damage is, how consequential, remains [unclear], but it must be very extreme.

At the same time, the war seems to be progressing in ways that are not so favorable to the United States. The price of oil is up, and American confidence of the war is down, and there seems to be no plan in the Trump administration to bring the war to an end on any of the terms that you might’ve thought America would’ve wanted, including permanent denuclearization of Iran and the free flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz.

I think, as I try to understand what, if anything, is going wrong, the Trump administration seems to have taught Iran how to defeat the Trump administration through the Trump administration’s own words. One of the things that [President] Trump has made very clear to the Iranians is how low his threshold for economic pain is. Every time he tries to jawbone the energy markets by making some statement just before the energy markets open that he hopes will lead to lower trades as soon as they do open—jawboning that worked at first and that now seems to be ceasing to be working—he is teaching the Iranians that if bad things happen in the energy market, Trump can’t take it. It may be their steel factories that are blowing up, it may be their leaders who are being killed, but it is Trump who seems to be showing more signs of panic and fear as he loses control of the situation and as he responds by making threats to escalate more, in ways that maybe create for him the alternative of either backing away from threats made—maybe he doesn’t take Kharg Island after all—or escalating into a ground war with Iran for which he has no permission from Congress, no mandate from the American people, probably not the resources to do, and certainly no political permission to suffer the pain of. Iran can read Western media as well as any of us can, and they can see the panic and terror of economic dislocation that is being broadcast by the Trump administration to the world.

If Trump wanted to fight a war in the Persian Gulf, one of the things you would think he would need to do would be to explain to the American people why the economic pain that must follow is worth it. He’s never done that. He promised them no economic pain. And every Sunday night, before markets open on Monday mornings in Asia and the rest of the world, he tries to incant some formula to keep things at bay for at least a few minutes. And as I said, at first, that worked; he bought a few minutes’ peace. Recently, it seems to have stopped working; he’s no longer buying a few minutes’ peace. But the economic realities are the economic realities. And incredibly, the much weaker party to the war, Iran, seems to be able to inflict pain that the stronger party to the war, the United States and its ally Israel—and especially the United States—can’t seem to bear.

Trump seems to think of wars as exercises in destruction; he doesn’t accept that they’re exercises in politics. And many of the people around him take pride in saying, We’re not doing any nation building. We’re not thinking about what comes after. We’re not worrying about permanent regimes. We’re just here to kill bad guys. But killing bad guys is very seldom an end in itself. At some point, the killing has to stop, and at some point, you have to deal with whatever is left. And that point will come earlier rather than later and maybe earlier than the United States can afford for that point to come if the United States has not given Americans any inkling of the pain that was likely to be headed their way, any reason for it, any reason to hope that things will be better after it.

So the Iranians are discovering that if they just inflict economic pain, which they can easily do, they can bring pressure to bear on Trump that is much greater on him than the pressure he is bearing to them by blowing up things and killing bad guys.

We don’t know how much margin of survival the Iranian regime has. It is, in many ways, a fragile country; it depends on oil exports, and the United States could interdict those oil exports if it wanted to. But because the United States doesn’t have a capacity for planning, it’s not interdicting Iranian oil exports. At the end of a month of war, Iran is exporting not only as much oil as it ever did, as much oil as it did last year, but it’s exporting that oil at a higher price, maybe billions and billions of dollars more a higher price than it was making before the war started. And that means that even if the United States were to succeed in reducing Iranian oil exports somewhat, it would not be putting budgetary pressure on the Iranian regime. It’s a plan for war without politics, and that’s a plan for war without success.

And now my dialogue with Graeme Wood.

[Music]

Frum: If Graeme Wood’s business card does not read “International Man of Mystery,” it should. His recent report from the Persian Gulf, “Snorkeling in the Strait of Hormuz,” is Graeme at his most characteristic: in the center of the action, seeing things the way no one else sees them, and preserving calm where most of us would see only danger and terror.

A Harvard graduate who now teaches at Yale, an Arabic speaker, Graeme began his journalism career as a reporter for The Cambodia Daily. On the outbreak of the Iraq War, he relocated to Iraq and was hired by The Atlantic, where he continues as a colleague to this day.

Graeme’s deep investigations of the ISIS terror organization generated a viral Atlantic article and were published in book form in 2016, The Way of the Strangers: [Encounters With the Islamic State], which won acclaim and awards all over the world, including the Governor [General’s] Award of Canada, of which Graeme and I are both citizens.

For the past two years, Graeme has closely studied the Iranian regime. As Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, Graeme has traveled to the region and reported intensely from both sides of the war zone, and it’s such a pleasure to welcome Graeme to The David Frum Show today. Graeme, thank you for joining me.

Graeme Wood: David, it’s good to be with you.

Frum: So let’s talk about your snorkeling adventure. (Laughs.) For those who have not read this amazing piece of reportage or seen the sprightly video that emerged from it, tell us, what was that day like?

Wood: So I had been in Dubai, and missiles were coming in, drones were coming in, and the Strait of Hormuz was more and more in the news because it was being closed, and that’s the choke point for about a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil. And my instinct was just to go see what it looked like. This is an area that I’d crossed before as a ferry passenger, but actually just laying eyes on it when it is the center of the world’s attention seemed important. So I just got in a car, drove there, and then chartered a dhow—d-h-o-w—which is one of these old wooden boats that, in normal times, it’s there for pleasure cruising; it’s there for smuggling. And guess what? Right now, it’s really cheap if you wanna hire a dhow for a pleasure cruise. And although you made me sound very intrepid by going out there, it was a quiet, beautiful day. There were dolphins, there were damselfish, and there was no sign at all of a war going on just over the cliffs.

Frum: Yeah. Because you think of it as, even from the energy trade and all the traffic, an area of environmental devastation even at the best of times, and now it’s the middle of a war zone, and it looked like holiday pics from the video you took.

Wood: It was. That’s exactly what it was. When you’re there, of course, because it’s closed, the ships are not going back and forth, so it’s quiet. In fact, in the strait, I saw lots of these dhows just idling there because it was not a time when you could safely go back and forth to Iran, and usually, they’d be going back and forth, mostly speedboats smuggling, but at this point, again, as calm as could be. So I spent about five hours in the fjords next to the strait and just a few miles into the strait itself, and saw, I would guess, fewer than half a dozen boats that were actually going back and forth across the strait. And of course, I didn’t see any evidence that anyone was going through the strait.

Frum: Well, this is one of the ways that this war shocked so many of our ideas about what modern war is like. We are so used to seeing everything, or at least being presented with images that purport to show us everything, and the idea that both combatants—the United States–Israel side on one hand and Iran on the other—would agree to a complete shutdown of imagery. And then on what is the central economic battlefield, the Persian Gulf, nothing is happening; that’s the news. So there are scenes, presumably, somewhere of extraordinary violence being unleashed, and yet we don’t see them; we just see this peaceful blue water.

Wood: Yeah, exactly. Right across the strait, if you went inland, you’d get to Minab, where there was the school famously destroyed by the United States, which killed possibly hundreds of children, so devastation is not that far away. But if you’re not right there, then what you see is calm waters. And also, by the way, you still see some traffic going back and forth. I mentioned six boats or so that I saw going back and forth. Those are smugglers who just decide that, you know, they live outside the law in the best of times, and so right now, they’re going back and forth. They’re bringing electronics to Iran, and in the past, they would usually bring goats back, apparently. So there’s still that going on. But mostly, you just see these calm waters and then dozens upon dozens of boats just waiting for it to be safe to go back in their usual route.

Frum: Are Iranian tankers able to move?

Wood: At that point, no, there was nothing going back and forth, so—

Frum: Or Chinese tankers serving the Iran trade, I should say.

Wood: There’s this extraordinary phenomenon going on right now where, while there’s a lockdown on Persian Gulf oil, Iran has been able to sell, actually, more than before, mostly going to China. So, yeah, at the moment, because of expensive oil and because of the need of everyone, including the United States, to loosen up the energy markets, Iran has been able to sell oil. But going back and forth through the Strait of Hormuz right now means you’re going under the eyes of Iranian missile launchers, as well as the United States, so it would take a pretty brave crew to wanna do that.

Frum: Now, you referenced lightly your departure from Dubai, but you were under fire there more than in the Gulf.

Wood: Yeah, that’s right. Dubai, at that point—I think it’s still the case today—the United Arab Emirates was getting more incoming Iranian drones and missile strikes than anywhere else. So I was there almost from the very beginning of the war, and, yeah, you’d hear the interceptions. I witnessed a couple of the hits and got to see what Dubai looked like, which I think you referenced earlier the information war here, too, which is a pretty extraordinary thing to watch on social media when you’re in the place that’s the subject of the social-media speculation. So there’s a lot of discussion of how Dubai was, quote, unquote, “over,” that the model was finished and that people were fleeing; there were refugees at the border. And that was a mismatch from what I saw while there. There was certainly fewer people who were going there as holiday-makers, but the place was mostly functioning as it used to, but with some booms in the background.

Frum: Now, Dubai doesn’t have the network of bomb shelters that Israel, which is receiving, also, a lot of Iranian attack, has. So what do people do for safety when the booms begin?

Wood: Well, at that point—and the numbers aren’t that much higher so far; the number of reported dead in the entire country is still in the single digits, so in general, it wasn’t as if there were explosions happening that were causing mass casualties. But, yeah, there’s nothing you can do. If a place is not built as a security state, the way Israel has had to be, then you just go on with life. And so I went to shopping malls, supermarkets, restaurants, and all of it was just still going on. There weren’t even, like, missile alerts that would cause people to go scrambling. In Ukraine, there were these apps that would tell you when a missile was incoming, and before too long, people would just ignore those in a lot of cities because they happened so frequently. And Dubai seemed to have skipped right ahead to that stage, so even two days after the war had begun, it seemed like nobody was heeding any of those alerts whatsoever and life was proceeding.

Frum: Now, your most recent article for The Atlantic, “Mutually Assured Energy Destruction,” suggests that what’s going on here is a kind of deterrence, actually, between the United States and Iran, where neither is hitting quite as hard as it potentially could. Dubai is a high-rise city full of, as you say, shopping malls. There are a lot of dense human targets. If you were seeking to maximize the infliction of loss of life, I assume the Iranians, even in their depleted state, could do more than they’re doing. Do you have a sense that this is inability on their part, or are they still fighting this war, in some ways, with one hand tied behind their back?

Wood: I think the latter. An enormous skyscraper, it’s not built as a military target. If you wanna take down the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, it would be very difficult to stop Iran from doing that if it wanted to concertedly send a fleet of drones to do so.

One thing that I think has been saving Dubai in particular, though, is that its cosmopolitanism is part of its shield. There are hundreds of thousands of Iranians who are in the Emirates. There are Russians. There are Chinese. So if they were to destroy one of those malls that I said was operating at lower capacity but still operating, [there] would definitely be a bunch of Russian, Chinese, and Iranian body parts strewn about.

So the Iranians, if they really wanted to destroy Dubai, they could do so, but they haven’t. And that, as you mentioned, goes for infrastructure as well; if they really wanted to hit oil infrastructure in the Gulf hard, I think they could do much more damage than they already had. But there would be consequences for their doing that.

Frum: They also presumably have a lot of their money in Dubai banks.

Wood: Oh, yeah. Even—

Frum: They being the Iranians, I should say.

Wood: Yeah, the Iranians have their money and their people—and I don’t just mean Iranian people who have gone there for work, but Muscat, Oman, which Oman has also been hit, and Dubai have a lot of Iranians who have just fled there because they considered it a safer place to be than Iran, possibly not aware that Iran would soon be attacking them. So it’s been a place of refuge for money and for people for some time, even high-level people. So, yeah, it’s complicated for Iran to strike a place that’s also a place of refuge for its own people and its allies.

Frum: Now, a decade ago, you wrote this remarkable article that became an acclaimed book getting inside the mind of ISIS. You’ve been doing some of that similar work with the Iranian regime, trying to get inside their brains. Anything that has happened in the past month of conflict to change any of your perspectives or enrich your thinking, as compared to where you were a month ago?

Wood: There’s one thing that’s happened, which was the death of Ayatollah [Ali] Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran for the last 30-plus years. His death, the rhetoric of it was martyrdom. But also, the fact that he almost presented himself as a target, in the sense that he was living, apparently, aboveground in his own compound and doing so at a time when it was pretty clear the Israelis or Americans were going to try to assassinate him, that brought back a lot of the rhetoric of martyrdom that one had heard throughout the history of the Islamic Republic, and it brought it back after a period of, I would say, not quite abeyance, but de-emphasis.

I would say that, unlike ISIS, if you look at the actions and the policies of the Islamic Republic over the last few decades, Iran has been much more rational, much more strategic, and much less motivated by some of the ideological aspects that they were so fervent in embracing in the beginning of the Islamic Republic, and ISIS was fervent up until the end. So when you see someone sort of offering himself up for martyrdom, then you go back to thinking about all the rhetorical emphasis on the martyrdom of the early imams in Shia Islam, so the martyrdom of [Saddam] Hussein, for example, which, again, I wouldn’t have thought of that as an operational concept, but there’s a bit of that that I see in this war and with the death of the supreme leader.

Frum: I think, going into this war, a lot of people in the United States and in the United States government assumed that the Iranian state had become a very rickety state, that the ideology didn’t move anybody anymore, the extraordinary sacrifices of the regime that occurred during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, that those days were over, and one hard blow, the whole structure would collapse. That’s turned out to be, obviously, not true. Do you have any opinion on the prevalence of this kind of ideology of martyrdom or other aspects of regime ideology?

Wood: Before the war, and I think still, actually, I would’ve said that that ideology had largely run out of gas. In Iran at the very beginning, it was almost impossible to overstate in the early days of the revolution in the 1980s how much it was part of what people were thinking and, to some degree, that there are people who even have kind of memory-holed some of the things they were saying about, say, the Ayatollah [Ruhollah] Khomeini possibly being this kind of quasi-messianic figure, the hidden imam himself, which nobody believes anymore and people pretend they never believed. But there’s been a long period of kind of strategic bureaucratization that has washed away a lot of the ideological stuff, and fewer and fewer people who believe it.

But the last time I was in Tehran was in 2009, and I went to regime rallies, and I met lots of people who were still very enthusiastic about this belief. Now, granted, many of them seem to have been bused in from the countryside, so they were not the cosmopolitan Tehrani types, but they do exist in the country, and I would say that there’s possibly a double-digit percentage of Iranians who still feel that way. So it’s not exhausted, but I don’t think it would be wrong to say that the country as a whole has lost that faith and has moved on to another phase in its development.

Frum: So there are people in your estimation—and, again, it’s a very dark box, and it’s been a while since you had access to the country—but it does seem there are people [who] would bear arms to defend the regime if Americans landed on Iranian soil.

Wood: Yes, yes, no doubt. And in addition to the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps], which is the main regime-loyalist military element, there are millions of Iranians who are part of the families of the IRGC, millions of people whose livelihoods depend on the regime, as the regime, remaining intact. Every Iranian I speak to, no matter what their view of things, says that a lot of these people are going to fight until the last drop of blood.

Frum: The United States has been studying the Iran problem very intensely for a long time. Even before the Iranian Revolution of 1979, people worried, or Americans worried, about the aggressive intentions that the shah of Iran might have. I think some of the war-gaming to defend Kuwait began with the idea that the shah might be the aggressor, not the Iraqis and not yet the Iranian regime. Since the hostage crisis of 1979, ’80, again, the United States has intensely war-gamed it. You assume there was a lot of deep knowledge of the Iranian system inside the United States government; yet the past month has not been very reassuring that the taxpayer is getting the Iran knowledge the taxpayer may have thought the taxpayer was paying for.

Wood: There are few wars that have been more intensely planned—as you say, war-gamed out—than a war against Iran. And I think the fact that that’s the case should make us maybe a little bit analytically humble about what’s gone on so far. Because any war that’s been planned out is planned out in phases: That is, there’s a stage one, a stage two, and a stage three. I would say whatever stage one is, it hasn’t gone that well, but we have to be cautious about judging stage one against what may be objectives that were reserved for stage two or three.

Now, what do I mean by that? It seems like we have, so far, almost no plan for leadership change, for regime change. And that may be because that’s a stage that, possibly, we’ll never get to but, possibly, that was planned for a later point in this war. So I’m a little bit cautious about just saying that the war looks like incompetence because some of the overall objectives have not been met. But there’s plenty to criticize in what’s already happened that’s apparent right before our eyes.

Frum: Yeah, I didn’t use the word incompetence; I talked about lack of understanding of Iranian society. Let me test a hypothesis on you, which is: Phase one, let’s suppose the military track of this war is going well, that the United States and Israel are destroying the things they wanted to destroy. They obviously are having great success finding the people they wanna find and eliminating them from the chessboard. Maybe the mistake was a lack of study of the American side of the equation.

Whenever the serious study of the Iran War began, in 1979, ’80, the assumption, I would guess, would be that Iran would’ve done something really bad: capture American hostages and detain them for a year and under horrible conditions or something else really bad. And the president would go on TV and explain to the American people why the United States was going to war with Iran. He’d go to Congress and get a vote from Congress. Congress would give it because Iran had done something bad. And then there would be a monthlong air campaign, followed by whatever phase two was, and everyone would understand you’re fighting in the Persian Gulf; there’s going to be economic hardship. And we would all bear it because Iran had done something so very, very bad.

The mistake here was, what if there was no reason to go to war that week? And the American people’s pain threshold was literally zero. So none of the obvious moves that Iran would do—closing the straits, interfering with the shipping of oil—none of them was there any appetite for in the United States, and the United States then had to conduct whatever phases of this war there are without any ability to take not only casualties, but even any economic hardship. That may be the missing piece. And that’s not the fault of the war gamers, because they all assumed, right, The reason the president gave us the “go” order was something bad had happened that we had to respond to, not, The president had a mood, and we’re going to war with no permission from the society, no vote from Congress, and no ability to accept any degree of economic pain.

Wood: There is a total failure so far in political messaging, very little explanation of what’s going on, why it has to happen now. And that’s messaging both to Americans and to Iranians, by the way. The Iranian people, especially in Tehran, where they’ve suffered by far the worst of the bombing, they’re not really sure if the United States and Israel really cares about them and really cares about some other objectives, such as just destroying the capability of whatever Iranian state exists, whether it’s a friendly one or an unfriendly one.

So all of that messaging takes preplanning, and it takes the development of some faith in what the administration and the military is saying, and that’s made us, as Americans, pretty vulnerable to Iranian propaganda. I know Americans who I think of as pretty sophisticated consumers of information who are repeating to me falsehoods that are stated by Iranian propaganda. Why are they doing that? Why are they susceptible? It’s because there’s no one on the American side who they can credibly turn to and then say, Ah, okay, well, this person explained why that’s not the case.

So there’s a horrible vulnerability that could have been averted if there was just some faith and rapport developed between the administration and the American people, the administration and the press. And as we know, that rapport has been completely destroyed, and in the information war, that’s a big problem.

Frum: And it’s not just a matter of communications. Politicians like to blame communications advisers as if communications were magic, but communications can’t be better than the thing communicated. So if the United States is embarking on a major war with Iran, there’d better be a reason. And you can’t just message the reason; you actually have to have the reason—and not just a reason for going to war with Iran in general, but going to war with Iran in the last week of February of 2026. Why was that the time? What was different? And if there was a belief, for example, that Iran was making a lot of progress in its missile program at that point or had reenergized the nuclear program that seemed to have been so damaged last summer, that’s something you have to say, and say it not just on TV, but to Congress. And none of that was done, raising the suspicion of the reason it’s not done is maybe it wasn’t true.

Wood: Yeah, this has been a long-term problem with not just this administration, but any previous administration’s plans or policies about war in Iran, which is that the Iranian progress is incremental and war is not incremental. War is a great big thing, and if Iran is slowly developing ballistic-missile capabilities, if it’s slowly developing drone capabilities, then at what point is the exact moment when the United States should do something about it? And every president before Trump has decided that that exact moment was postponable—and they may have been right. They all, in that sense, get an A grade because there was no war, there was no nuclear weapon in Iran, and so they can hand it off to their [successor]. But anytime the war was gonna happen, it was gonna have to happen as a kind of judgment call about an accumulation of things, rather than one thing that could be pointed to.

Frum: When I think about what Trump may be trying to do, giving him the highest level of credit—and this is not credit in the sense of moral credit, just intellectual credit—he may have been convinced or he may believe that lots and lots of people in the upper reaches of the Iranian regime are crooks rather than fanatics. And if you can identify the fanatics and kill enough of them, eventually, your shovel will clink on the treasure chest—that is, the level of crooks—you will open the treasure chest, find your crooks, and then you can do business with them, not in a way that will bring satisfaction to the people of Iran, whom we’re ostensibly trying to help, although Trump has never been very empathic on that subject. But you bring together a degree of crooked leaders, as has happened in Venezuela, as I think is the plan in Cuba. You empower the crooks. You can do business with them; they’ll do what they’re told in order to keep their money. And then they become less of a nuisance from a strategic point of view. Does that make any sense, and based on your interactions with upper-elite Iranians, does any of that plan make any sense?

Wood: I think there are a couple things that he might have been surprised by, if that was the plan. One is how deep you have to dig before you get to the clink, that almost anybody who was in the inner circle of Iranian politics was gonna be very difficult to work with because they had not just blood on their hands, but they had been at the intersection of many different types of immoral activity that’s kind of irredeemable in some way. So that’s the first thing.

I have also spoken to Iranian exiles who have asked why that wasn’t the policy, why wasn’t he constantly digging deep enough to find someone he could work with? ’Cause they say, actually, it seems like he’s not looking for that at all; he’s just digging and digging and digging, and trying to discard as much of the regime as possible. And that is why everybody’s fighting to the death, is because it appears that the only resolution that the United States would be happy with would be some kind of complete scalping of the regime, to a very deep level, and its replacement with the shah or something like that. And they say if the United States had just announced pretty early on, or found a way pretty early on, to get someone in the regime to defect, then they actually would’ve, possibly, been able to do that with a lot less loss of life.

So it’s possible that they’re looking for someone who can be compromised like that. But they’re digging pretty deep and killing a lot of people before they’re coming to someone they’re satisfied with.

Frum: Their message to the Iranian regime seems to be completely incoherent, which is, We want unconditional surrender. We want you to negotiate a deal. Yes, you can keep control of the Strait of Hormuz, which we’ve just annexed. No, you can’t. Do you think the messaging direct to the Iranians, through whatever channel it’s going, is any more clear than the message to the world that we’re all hearing a contradictory version of every single day?

Wood: I think part of this is just a kind of controlled chaos of negotiation, which is the mode that Trump seems to prefer. So understandably, we listen to what the president of the United States says when he says what he’d be satisfied with, but then, of course, we have to remember that this president doesn’t seem to know himself what he would be satisfied with, and so we can’t quite take that as a direct negotiating position. Like today, Trump said that the current leaders of the regime are people you can work with. And do we take that at face value, which sounds a lot like the democratic aspirations of the Iranian people matter not one bit to him? Or—

Frum: Yeah. Today is Monday, March 30, the day you and I are recording.

Wood: Right. As oil markets open up, he says there’s people at the top we can deal with, which would cause the hearts of Iranian democrats—who’ve, of course, lost 30,000 people very recently—to sink. But then again, it may also be that if you’re opening a negotiation, which he is, with someone, then you don’t wanna say at the beginning of negotiation, There’s no negotiation that can happen, because then the negotiation stops. So, again, there’s weird and conflicting messaging that we’re getting, and it might just reflect the weird and conflicting thoughts of our commander in chief.

Frum: Yeah. Well, or it may reflect a desire to manipulate energy markets.

Wood: Yes, that’s what the Iranians have said. [Mohammad-Bagher] Ghalibaf, who’s thought to be kind of the day-to-day operator of the Iranian state, said, Yeah, Trump cares a lot about energy markets, and so you should disregard a lot of what he says, which sounds wise to me, actually.

Frum: Yeah. And the energy markets last week seemed to often buy it, and they seemed to respond positively when Trump said something. And one of the things that seemed significant today, Monday, March 30, is Trump said something reassuring and the energy markets ceased to buy it; they don’t believe it anymore.

Wood: Yeah, a lot of what’s happening right now is there’s an accumulation of problems. There’s realities that become more real as time goes by. The Strait of Hormuz, of course, it could be opened up, and it would flow just like it always did, if there was some agreement that could be reached. But now, of course, the markets are starting to have to price in exactly how much damage was done to Qatar’s gas infrastructure, exactly how much damage is likely to be done if there’s an escalation of the war to Saudi Arabia, to Kuwait, and so forth. So these become more real as the war fails to find a resolution.

Frum: Because, as you reported in mid-March, it’s amazing how much damage to oil production, to energy production on the southern side of the Gulf has not yet happened—to Saudi Arabia, to Kuwait, to the other Gulf states—that Iran has not yet hit them as hard as it, imaginably, could.

Wood: Yeah, I’ve been reporting for the last week or so about exactly what a hard hit to that energy infrastructure of Saudi Arabia and Qatar would look like, and there are particular nodes where, if you hit them, it takes years to recover. And taking that much oil and gas offline, it’s almost impossible to overstate how serious a blow that is to the world’s economy.

So Iran has demonstrated very clearly that if it wants to hit an area that is, you know, 10 meters by 10 meters on an American air base in Saudi Arabia, it can do that. So if they wanna do the same thing on an oil field, which cannot fly away, cannot have a hardened shelter built over it, then why couldn’t they do that too? This is, I think, totally within their capability.

Frum: This is the destruction of those surveillance planes that were parked out in the open air in a very arrogant way, it seemed.

Wood: Yeah, that’s right. And probably the most clear illustration so far of the failure of the United States to prepare for a very predictable threat, which is a drone attack of the sort that Ukraine and Russia has been perfecting for years now. So if they can do that to one of the most valuable air assets that the United States has, then they can do it to a piece of refinery equipment that’s been sitting out under open skies for years. And those things, again, can take years to replace.

Frum: Did you hear anyone talk, when you were in the Gulf, about, Look, obviously, these small, rich states need a protector, but maybe China would be a more predictable and reliable protector than Trump’s United States, which seems so erratic and confusing and prone to blundering into wars it doesn’t know how to finish?

Wood: Yeah, in some way, China already is a protector, and let me explain that. A huge percentage of that oil that exits Saudi Arabia is going to China. So if Iran were to destroy that hydrocarbon infrastructure of the Arab states, then China would be hurt. So if China wants to say, and I would say if I were China, Don’t do that—don’t do anything irreversible to that oil infrastructure, then Iran would probably have to listen because China is one of the few remaining friends that it has. So there’s that.

Also, though, if you talk to the Saudis, for example—I brought this up when I had an interview with the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, and I asked at what point, if you feel disrespected by the United States, you turn to the Chinese. And he very openly said, Look, there’s people in the east who would be very happy for us to be disrespected by the United States, and we’re ready to turn toward them.

Now, there’s many other Saudis who, maybe in a moment of less impulse and pique [who] would say, Okay, well, that would be complicated to do. Io turn away from the United States after the long, productive relationship we’ve had with them would be like turning from 110 volts to 220 for the entire country, where we’ve set up ourselves completely to work with the Americans, and to change that to the Chinese would not be a minor step; it would not be an overnight step. So it wouldn’t be that easy to do, but all of those countries have developed strong relationships with China that I think are, in a way, protecting them already, and of course, they’ll probably see ways that it would be useful for them to hedge by developing those connections too.

Frum: Yeah. As I understand the math of the Persian Gulf, it’s 20 percent of the world’s oil—or as you correct me—shipborne oil, because a lot of oil moves by land. Eighty percent of that oil moves to East Asia, not just China, but Japan, South Korea, others, but China being the single largest consumer. But there’s only one world price, so it’s not like the United States can shrug it off. And that, whatever happens, Americans pay at the pump because even if you buy 100 percent American-made fuel, that 100 percent American-made fuel is priced according to whatever the world price is, according to the marginal buyer. Because the Chinese could also buy from—so long as we have any kind of free market in energy, if the Persian Gulf is closed, then there are more bidders for American oil or for oil from Norway or from other suppliers, so there’s one price, even though 80 percent of the Persian Gulf’s oil flows to East Asia.

Wood: Yeah, that’s correct. There’s one other important fact about Persian Gulf oil and Saudi oil in particular, which is, the Saudis have this magical ability to produce more or less oil whenever they wish. This is something that other countries basically don’t have. So in that sense, they kind of operate as a sort of Fed in the hydrocarbon business. And so to take them offline, to remove that capability, means that there’s a very important economic lever that no longer is in American hands, Saudi hands, anyone’s hands. And having those levers at hand can be awfully important for world markets.

Frum: Well, there are two other sort of more radical thoughts on the energy market that I come away with watching this, and clearly, these are things that can’t be done today or tomorrow, or they’re a [decade’s] work, but if you look just at the map, the distance from the Persian Gulf to Haifa in Israel, all the way through Saudi territory, is not greater than the pipeline that Saudi Arabia built from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea. They went to the trouble of building a diversionary pipeline that allows them to export via the Red Sea that is past the Houthis in Yemen. But you could also build a pipeline to Israel and go through the Mediterranean and be surrounded by friendly people the whole way. They didn’t do that—for political reasons, I assume. And meanwhile, in the past decade, the United States under two Trump administrations, with a not-very-effective Biden administration between, has made very little progress moving itself and moving the world away from petroleum, when we’ve had a decade of opportunity and technology that enabled us to do that if we were minded to do it.

Wood: Yeah, the idea of taking a pipeline all the way to Israel is, of course, several political steps off, but the integration with Israel, it’s pretty obvious that that was one of the end points of Saudi development. That whole city in the desert, which so far [has] gotten not very far, Neom, it’s in the upper left corner of Saudi Arabia. It only makes sense to build it there if you believe that that particular region is ripe for development, so I think of it as predicated, in the long term, over some kind of friendly relationship with Israel, maybe including a pipeline. It just hasn’t happened yet, and the money doesn’t seem to be quite there for it.

The planning for a post-oil economy, of course, this is still considered fantasy in that region, and it’s far enough away that I don’t blame them for expecting that oil is still gonna matter quite a bit in the future.

Frum: Mm-hmm. But the United States has been talking about this for a long time, and there are brief intervals, but Trump 1, Trump 2 have rejected it, and the Biden administration talked about it a lot but didn’t do much.

Wood: You mean talking about oil dependence in the Middle East?

Frum: Shifting to fleets of electric vehicles powered by nonpetroleum sources of fuel. In the United States, of course, natural gas has huge potential for electrical production, and so does nuclear power, if we could ever return to that. It’s pretty hard to imagine how you power aviation with anything other than petroleum, but the days when you need petroleum to power your motor fleet, those could be behind us.

Wood: That would be wonderful, and that would lower the stakes of the current conflict substantially. So I’m all in favor of that, but as you point out, it just hasn’t happened.

Frum: That was a 10-years-ago discussion, not a 10-years-from-now discussion, and we just drove past that exit kind of heedlessly.

Wood: The 10-years-ago discussion and 20-years-ago discussion also involved developing American independence in oil, which did happen and which has eased the stakes of this war for the United States substantially, so it’s not as if no planning happened in that direction. But the one that we would, of course, want the most, which is not relying on oil at all, no, that’s still in, let’s say, early phases.

Frum: You’ve been traveling in this region for a long time—in the Middle East region. Do you notice any abating of intense anti-Western ideology? It seems like the days of al-Qaeda and ISIS are over, but that may be just a misreading from a distance. Do you have any sense that there’s actually less purchase in the area for these kinds of anti-Western ideology? And if so, what’s replacing it?

Wood: Yeah. The Gaza war, of course, matters a lot in this discussion. There is a whole new wave of—I don’t wanna call it radicalization, but hatred of the United States and Israel that has come up in the wake of the Gaza war. But I think the larger secular trend is definitely away from jihadism. And ISIS represented the high point of a kind of, call it jihadi, Salafi, or Wahabi, version of jihadism, where ISIS was so successful in the period of its greatest prosperity and flourishing that it attracted anyone who had that in mind. They were able to travel there; they were able to die there. And a success that’s that acute is followed by a long period of Hard to top that. Time to move on to a different thing. And I find that, yeah, there’s a lot of people in countries that I previously would’ve associated with a lot of very harsh anti-Americanism where that seems to be treated as a previous generation’s way of being political. So it’s definitely waned in that regard.

The other component here is Iran, where, again, it’s been since 2014 when I was last in Iran and 2009 when I was last in Tehran, but there, the positive views toward the United States are impossible to ignore, as of then. And I think that’s still the case, where—just as I think you’ve probably heard many times—you would meet people all the time who don’t just say, I would move to the United States if I could, but who say, I have positive feelings toward the United States and would like to live in a society like that, no matter where I am. So I think that’s real, and I don’t know whether it survives this war.

Frum: A last personal question: Do you intend to return to the region anytime soon? Do you think there’ll be things for you to see that you can usefully report?

Wood: Yes, I would love to go back as soon as possible. It’s a question of where to go. I would like to go to Iran itself. Some journalists are getting in, including from Western outlets. I don’t expect that that’s gonna be—would be easy to do. But this is a regional war, and so I’m thinking pretty hard about where in the region one should go to see the sort of invisible aspects of what’s going on, that there’s places where Iranians have flowed across the border out of fear of war and I’d love to talk to them. Iran has had its hooks deep in Iraq for a while now, and there’s war happening there, too, so finding out what the dynamics there are. It’s just a matter of where to go, but I certainly wanna go somewhere as soon as possible.

Frum: Graeme, thanks so much for talking to me today. Everyone should follow your work in The Atlantic and your two most recent articles on “Mutually Assured Energy Destruction” and “Snorkeling in the Strait of Hormuz.”

Wood: Thank you, David.

Frum: Bye-bye.

[Music]

Frum: Thanks so much to Graeme Wood for joining me today on The David Frum Show. As mentioned earlier, my book this week is Common Sense, by Thomas Paine. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense is one of the remarkable trio of books that were published 250 years ago this year. I’ve already discussed the first volume of Edward Gibbon’s [The History of the] Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; that was published in February of 1776. The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith, was published in March of 1776. Now we’re going to reach all the way back to January of 1776, when Common Sense was published as a pamphlet in the United States.

At the time, the United States had a population of about 3 million people, not all of them free, not all of them literate. But in that population of some 3 million people, almost half a million copies of Thomas Paine’s pamphlet were sold over the coming years. It is maybe the greatest best seller in the country’s history, apart from the Bible, and maybe even in terms of speed of penetration bigger than the Bible in any given year. It’s a book that is worth rereading because it remains, to this day, accessible and powerful.

Now, Thomas Paine was an unusual person to make an impact in the United States. He was actually English-born, British-born, came to the United States, and he was someone who was, in many ways, a man of the future. He was not a religious man; he was a deist at most, maybe an outright atheist. He certainly rejected all forms of organized religion at a time when the United States was one of the most religious societies in the world. And he was, in many ways, a visionary of the future. His later books would outline some kind of image of a welfare state, when he was writing in the 1790s. But in 1776, he addressed himself directly at the feelings and beliefs of his adopted country, and he made an impact on them unlike anything seen before or maybe since.

Common Sense breaks down into a series of sections. It begins with some thoughts on government and society. In this respect, it’s one of the first libertarian manifestos. He draws a distinction between government and society, and regards society as a positive good, government as a necessary evil. And then, for a book that is going to be about declaring American independence from Britain, he begins not with the American-British relationship, but with a general attack on the concept of monarchy. He begins with a case for revolution that would be as binding and applicable in England and the United Kingdom as in the United States. And only after he makes his case against monarchy does he make a case for American independence. So this is a book that is a revolutionary manifesto not just for Americans, but for people anywhere that the English language is spoken.

It also was a book that went maybe farther than many Americans would later wish. Thomas Paine would end up re-emigrating from the United States and find himself in a jail in revolutionary France because his thoughts were so at variance with his own society when his own society, after the Revolutionary War ended, tried to put the Revolution back in a box.

Thomas Paine was not a man to be put in a box. His attack on any unjustifiable form of inequality is one that had enduring implications for a society that found itself, after it gained independence, still in many ways a society bound by many forms of inequality: racial the most obvious—free versus slave—but others too. It would take the United States a very long time to become the country that Thomas Paine imagined and urged in January of 1776, and that, I suppose, is why we go on reading this book.

We quote it too. But we quote it, as so often is the case, often without understanding. It’s only a few dozen pages long, I think 48 pages. It’s worth rediscovering for yourself and reminding yourself of what a radical proposition it was in 1776 to imagine not just the United States free of English rule—many distant countries had broken away from their founding countries—but a society that would become a new kind of society altogether: a society based on both liberty and equality, ideas always in tension, ideas that maybe Thomas Paine did not think through entirely—he was a writer and a polemicist much more than he was a philosopher. But he put these concepts in motion in ways that speak to us still and that are worth rediscovering on this 250th anniversary of the publication of Common Sense, by Thomas Paine.

Thank you so much for joining me today on The David Frum Show. Thanks to all who watch and listen to this program. As always, if you are minded to support the work of this program, the best way to do it is by supporting and subscribing to The Atlantic, where both Graeme Wood and I work, and where we are both grateful for your readership. I look forward to speaking to you next week here on The David Frum Show. Bye-bye.

[Music]

Read full story at source