Paper Tiger: Trump’s Lost Iran War is Making Everything More Expensive (Ian Masters Interviews Juan Cole)

Ian Masters Interviews Juan Cole on the Iran War and Energy Crisis for Background Briefing

Here are the audio and a written transcript:

Transcript:

Ian Masters: Welcome back, I’m Ian Masters, and this is background briefing available 247 at backgroundbriefing.org, and joining us now is Juan Cole, Professor Middle Eastern, and South Asian history, at the University of Michigan, is also the author of the blog informed comment at juancole.com, and the author of Muhammad Prophet of Peace, Amid the Clash of Empires, and most recently, Gaza yet Stands, his latest articles that Informed Comment include “Trump terrified of impact on midterms, of $6 a gallon diesel, as his war spirals out of control,” and “Have the U.S. Israel, and Saudis lost the Battle of the Narrows,” and “Pentagon Iran war report admits to worst drubbing since Vietnam.” Welcome to Background Briefing, Juan Cole.

Juan Cole: Thanks so much, Ian.

Ian Masters: Well, thanks for joining, so it’s difficult to know where to start with all the bad news that you’re delivering, but, uh, you’re dealing with reality, right? And we have a president and a secretary of defense, and to some extent, a prime minister in Israel, who don’t aren’t dealing with reality, or don’t seem to want to face reality.

Juan Cole: Oh, no, they say silly things, in order to talk up the markets, or to reassure people. Even our Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Besant, has said that, you know, the Strait of Hormuz will be irrelevant, because they’ll bring the oil up through pipelines to the Mediterranean, and Prime Minister, Netanyow, in Israel has said similar things. I could never understand this talking point, because the pipelines are just as vulnerable as the straits. The Iraqi . . ..

Ian Masters: That’s been shown by the attack from Iraq of Iranian proxies on the Saudi East-West pipeline that’s now shut down. That’s pretty clear, isn’t it?

Juan Cole: Yes, I mean, it hit important routing stations along that pipeline, as well as the pipeline itself. It appears it’ll take weeks to repair it. And of course, after it’s repaired, it’s still vulnerable. So that strike on the East-West Saudi pipeline has provoked a crisis in the oil markets of the sort that many of us have been warning about, that the market is tight, and if anything else goes wrong, or if China comes back into the market in a big way — because it had stopped using as much imports and had resorted to its vast strategic petroleum reserves — then the price would spike. And the price is spiking.

Ian Masters: So let’s start with your article, “Have the U.S. Israel and Saudis lost the Battle of the Narrows?” — the narrows being these choke points, like Straits of Hormuz, and the Gates of Grief [Bab al-Mandab] at the Red Sea. And, of course, the Navy, US Navy has referred to these narrows as SLOCs, Strategic Lanes of Communications. And I guess the point that you’re making, you go way back in history to the Portuguese, for example. Rather than have to have vast armadas trying to control the vast oceans of the Pacific, and the Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean, all you have to do is control the straits, the narrows, right?

Juan Cole: That’s right. Alfred Thayer Mahan, the great U.S. naval theorist of the late 19th century, made this point in his own writing about naval supremacy, and gave examples from the Portuguese Empire, but especially from the British Empire. Of course, the British had Aden in Yemen. They had the mouth of the Red Sea. They controlled the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, at the height of the British Empire. Those were extremely important choke points, or narrows, that underpinned the power of the British Navy and the British economic empire in the world. So my point is that since Trump foolishly launched this unnecessary war of aggression on Iran on February 28th, the United States has lost control of those chokepoints, unlike all of the previous empires, those maritime empires, who had those chokepoints. The U.S. now does not, and cannot control them. There is no prospect of it restoring control. And, of course, things are very different than in Portuguese times, but one of the reasons is that the Iranians and their allies have demonstrated that they can simply sabotage shipping through those straits or narrows. All of the anti drone and anti missile missiles that the United States has in its arsenal can’t stop that sabotage.

Ian Masters: Clearly, Trump and Hegseth don’t know about history, right? This has never occurred to them. I mean, Hegseth is such a catastrophe, and, you know, little Mikey Johnson, a good Christian speaker of the house, shut down the house a day early to avoid a impeachment. bill or an impeachment debate from Tom Massie, which could have really deeply embarrassed Hegseth, you know. He’s so delusional, he and his wife, who kind of runs his presidential campaign. They actually, think this guy can actually become president. So you’re dealing with a total idiot and a complete incompetent, and he’s clearly delusional. Like his hero, Donald Trump.

Juan Cole: Oh, yes, well, no, the defense department is is clearly being poorly run, and calling it a war department doesn’t change that. You know, it’s not just that Hegseth is incompetent himself, and full of impractical ideas, which he shouts at the top of his voice. But he won’t listen to the people below him who actually know the world. He fires them. And so, if you won’t take advice, you know, the United States government is a big enterprise, and is full of experts, of people who’ve been around the world, who’ve served in Bahrain, and Oman, and elsewhere, in Yemen itself. And who know the lay of the land and the lay of the sea, and know how things work. And they’ve, you know, came to Hegseth and Trump over and over again in the past eight months and told them that this is a very bad idea. But they won’t listen. So now we’re to this point where our energy costs are going way up. It’s caused underlying inflation to creep up, and therefore, the Fed has had no choice but to increase interest rates slightly. That’s been a drag on the markets, and so we could well be seeing economic disruption out of this war. And it was all completely unnecessary. Trump just, and Hegseth, didn’t have to do this. And it was also foreseeable that if they did it, it would be a huge catastrophe.

Ian Masters: So, thanks to some soldiers in Oman, in the Gulf, they leaked photographs to CBS News of some of the damage done in Bahrain. And in Saudi Arabia and in Kuwait. And it’s pretty dramatic, and, of course, this idiot, this despicable, little, strutting, white supremacist moron, Hegseth, who you know, is obsessed with push ups and testosterone, but meanwhile, he’s creating a catastrophe. He’s censoring all this information. I mean, you know, during the Vietnam War, you had the five o’clock follies with Westmoreland, but the press were there. and able to expose the lies. Well, he shut the press out, except for the sycophantic lunatics on the far right. And we’re paying a huge price here. We don’t know exactly what the damage is, but these AWACS planes and tankers, and A-10s and F-15s, and the reaper drones, they’ve been losing them. They’re $30 million apiece, aren’t they? Or even more. So, do we know what the bill is so far?

Juan Cole: Oh, no. I mean, the Pentagon put out this report and put it at $34 billion, but everybody thinks that’s risible. It’s much more; at least three times that, if not four times that. And that’s only the military damage, because, you know, the Pentagon report admits damage to hundreds of structures on the bases the United States has. You know, the word base is an ambiguous term; various kinds of installations are called bases. There are 20 or more such installations of the United States, in the Middle East. Hundreds of structures have been damaged or destroyed on those bases. A base, an American base is not supposed to be destroyed. I mean, the base is there, as, you know, it’s a forward operating mechanism. It’s a way of attack.

So that the headquarters of the 5th Fleet in Manama appears to be completely inoperable. That’s what the Pentagon said. I mean, that means the base has been destroyed. And that was the base, you know, to which the Fifth Fleet reported. Our ships docked there. The signals intelligence for controlling the Gulf came out of there, We’ve been blinded, the troops have no place to land for R&R. They had to send them to Thailand, and they had to run things out of this little island, that the British are leasing them, Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean. I mean, it’s a very suboptimal s situation for the U.S. Navy. And that’s just one of the 20 installations that has been damaged. That one’s inoperable. Others have been badly damaged. It’s not clear whether they’re operable. And I’ve I have to tell you, Ian, I’ve never seen anything like this since the fall of South Vietnam.

Ian Masters: Right, but the targeting of these American assets, particularly these expensive and irreplaceable ones like the AWACS, that’s being done by the Russians. And it’s so precise that the Iranians, early in the war, were able to fire a drone at the US embassy — at the CIA part of the US embassy in Riyadh, in Saudi Arabia. The first drone punched a hole in the wall, and then the second drone went through that hole and blew up the office of the head or blew up the CIA station. I don’t know whether people were inside or were killed, but that kind of accuracy can only be explained by Russia’s help. And this ridiculous traitor we have as a president, is saying, Oh, how great Putin and she have been, and they’ve been so cooperative. What the hell is going on with him?

Juan Cole: Well, we know, you know, right from 2016, there was some evidence that he’s in Putin’s back pocket, and that’s been demonstrated over and over again. Ukrainians are finally making some headway against the Russians by targeting their oil and diesel refineries. And Trump came out this week and begged Zelinsky to stop doing that. So, you know, whose side is he on? But I think what it is, is that he has provoked this diesel crisis in the United States, where the prices have gone over $6 a gallon. A lot of his base depends on trucking. and is rural. And so they’re hurting. And I think he wants to blame Zelinsky for this rather than himself, because most of the price pike is coming out of his Iran war, and he doesn’t want people to know this. But in any case, yes, you know, United States put tremendous sanctions on the Russian economy, and organized Europe to resist Putin in the Ukraine, and I don’t want to speak to all that, except to say that it would be odd if Russia didn’t respond in some way, and giving some surreptitious help to the Iranians is just one of the ways that they’re responding.

Ian Masters: Well, but the trickle down impact of the price of diesel, which is going up, by the way, it’s past $6. It will probably be $7 a gallon before we know it. That is passed on to the American consumer, because all the trucking expenses that they have go up, that means all the food and everything that’s moved by 18 wheelers, which is massive, because we basically don’t have a rail infrastructure in this country. We only have trucking, and the farmers, their farm equipment runs on diesel. They, you know, have to raise the prices, so the prices are starting at the farms and through the trucking industry, through the distribution. You can see how it’s hitting the consumer, because I don’t know about you, Juan, but every time I go to the supermarket, I get sticker shock. It’s like, unbelievable how quickly the prices are going up. And you can see, you know, and of course, the Fed yesterday had to raise interest rates because of inflation caused by these rising prices of gas and diesel.

Photo by Jordan Whitfield on Unsplash

Juan Cole: Yes, you put your finger on it. 70% of the commodities in our retail sector are delivered by truck, and that’s delivered by diesel. So, prices for everything are going to go up, and we’re only at the beginning of this price spike. Things will, as you say, get worse. And, you know, it’s a little bit complicated in that, crude oil is refined into various products, diesel, distillates, gasoline, and then there’s a heavy leftover that’s used for shipping. And all of those are going up, but diesel is especially pricey now, so the tendency is for the refineries to make more of the crude into diesel, which means that they’re making less gasoline. So, gasoline prices will go up.

And now China seems to be coming back into the market. It had cut way back on its petroleum imports and had depended on drawing down its vast reserves. But, you know, you can only do that so long. The point of a reserve is to have it there, and if you use it all up, then it’s not there and is strategically useless. So, for various reasons — the sanctions that the United States has put on Russia and now has tightened on Iran also are hurting Chinese refineries. So, they’re having to go elsewhere, which means they’re competing with us for imports. And Chris Wright, the Secretary of Energy, who’s an oil man, will try to tell you that the United States is self-sufficient in petroleum and is not true. Or is not true in a meaningful way. We still import a lot of our gasoline, and so we’re in competition in the world market, and that’s going to cause the price to go up. And so this is a disaster. It’s something that all of us who know anything about the oil markets began worrying about as soon as Trump went into Iran. And now those chickens are coming home to roost.

Ian Masters: Juan Cole, thank you very much for joining us here today.

Juan Cole: Thank you, Ian.

Ian Masters: And again, I’ve been speaking with Juan Cole. He’s a professor of modern Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. He’s also the author of the blog Informed Comment at juancole.com, and the author of Muhammad Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires, and most recently, Gaza yet stands, and his latest articles in Informed Comment include “Trump terrified of impact on midterms of $6 a gallon diesel, as his war spirals out of control.” and “Have the U.S. Israel and Saudis lost the Battle of the Narrows,” and “Pentagon Iran War Report admits to worst Drubbing since Vietnam.”

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