Ambassador Dan Kurtzer

So there are no winners here.

Everybody's a loser.

And of course, you know, in a much more narrow sense, you and I and our neighbors are losers because we're going to be paying much higher prices for the things that we were told by this president were going to come under control, the groceries and gas at the pump.

It may stabilize in a few months, maybe.

It may not stabilize in a few months because of the degree to which oil and gas facilities both in Iran and in the Gulf have now been destroyed.

How long will it take to rebuild them?

So in a sense, we're going to bear the burden as consumers and as citizens of this war far longer than governments are going to bear that burden.

They're going to move on.

We know already President Trump has his eyes set on Cuba.

He's lost interest in this war and we're going to be paying for this war long after it figures in any of the administration's calculations.

Well, I'd argue the jury is still out on the degree of success.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman some years ago announced a Saudi 30-30 vision in which the society would open up.

There would be a better distribution of wealth.

There would be a reduction on the reliance on fossil fuels, building up industry and the services and so forth.

There was a major project undertaken to build not just a city, but a whole complex of cities along the Red Sea coast to move population from the internal area within the country to the periphery.

And that has not worked very well.

The United Arab Emirates experiment was, until four weeks ago, far more successful because they decided some years ago that they would use their oil and gas wealth to become a transportation and tourism hub.

And it was working.

If you look at transportation networks and the flow of tourism, the airline routing through over the Middle East, whether it was Dubai or Abu Dhabi or even elsewhere in the Gulf,

The world was looking at that area as a kind of crossroads for much of the commerce and commercial interaction.