AVOID AUTARKY

“The obvious energy shock that we compare it to are the shocks of the 1970s. 1973, the oil embargo where Arab members of OPEC declined to export their oil to the United States and other supporters of Israel in the 1973 war. But they also started to take oil off the market, the absolute amount of oil that was on the market. So, percentage wise and the physical number of barrels that were taken off the market in 1973 is considerably less than is happening today. As you and your listeners will have heard over and over again, this is the biggest supply disruption that we've ever seen.”

“And the reasons for this goes back to the time that I spent in Iraq. I spent about two years in Iraq immediately after Saddam fled, and then throughout the years that followed off and on. And America's 2003 war in Iraq was about primarily weapons of mass destruction. It was not about getting control over Iraqi oil. But to this day, most Iraqis, when they try to make sense of the American intervention, they come back to oil, that it must have been about Iraqi oil. So, in a world where President Trump said over the weekend, he wishes he could just take the oil. That's what he'd like to do if the American people would allow him to. I think this is going to be rhetoric that we're going to hear throughout Iranian politics for a long time to come and not to America's benefit.”

“The downside is, of course, this is going to make many more countries and economies, at least in the medium term, susceptible to political and economic pressure from China because China is the country that has a real dominance over clean energy supply chains. So again, the energy weapon is back, but it's not just the old weapon. It's not just oil and gas. It's also weaponization of clean energy supply chains.”

“Well, I would say it never went away. It just kind of receded to the background. And part of it allows me to pick up where I left off with this, the 1970s and the reaction of the world to becoming more integrated, to building up the global market in a way that oil became the most easily traded commodity in the world. So this is a very flexible global market that you can buy and sell pretty much in any part of the market, and the market will help that barrel of oil find its way to the most efficient destination. So this evolved over time, and it made the prospect of using energy as a weapon less attractive because the market could defuse the shock of cutting off a single supplier.”

“When Iran shut the Strait of Hormuz, Trump said, who knew they'd do that? Well, his own Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, told a Senate hearing that that was exactly the assessment of the entire intelligence community. Trump said nobody expected Iran to attack the Gulf states if it were provoked. Wrong again. Multiple former policymakers have told me this is exactly what was expected in war games. Experts sometimes get it wrong. You still need them in the room.”

“I mean, certainly Russia and the former Soviet Union, I would say, has thought about stirring up geopolitical tensions as a way of increasing the price of oil. This has been documented for people who are historians and have looked through the Politburo notes from the end of the Soviet Empire, that it was actively debated whether the Soviet Union should stir up problems in the Middle East simply to increase the price of oil. So I wouldn't go so far as to say that Russia had any particular hand in instigating this phase of this conflict. But I agree with you that for the moment, Russia is really benefiting from this.”

“We call it the Iran shock and the dangerous illusion of energy autarky, which is the idea that many countries are probably feeling, wow, exposure to this global market is dangerous, and we want to pull away from this global market. Now that could manifest itself in a number of ways. If you're China, it might mean you're going to stockpile energy. We actually saw Fatih Barul, the Executive Director of the International Energy Agency, just in the last day or so, warring countries, none by name, but warring countries generally don't stockpile. This is going to worsen the crisis.”

“But in Venezuela, President Trump very explicitly said, this is about taking control of the oil. And to me, it was harkening back again to a very old frame of thinking, but it also didn't really make sense to me. In a world where the price of oil was bumping along at $65 and American producers were struggling to make ends meet with such a low oil price, to claim that we should use American military prowess to try to bring more Venezuelan oil onto the global market. I didn't see how that made sense for America commercially, except in the one narrow sense, which is not insignificant, but keeping China and Russia from really having the ability to develop Venezuela's oil.”