Daniel Yergin

Does anyone really know what goes on behind closed doors at the Supreme Court?

I'm Preet Bharara, and this week, New York Times investigative journalist Jodi Kantor joins me to discuss her expose on the court's shadow docket.

The episode is out now.

That's a very good question because I've been thinking about the fact that the blockade against the export of Iranian oil demonstrates the degree to which Iran, as a country for well over a century, has been a country that has been made possible by oil.

Iran, like in the 1960s, was competing with Saudi Arabia to be the largest Middle East oil producer.

It's much more oil than it's producing today.

And that oil wealth was channeled by the Shah of Iran into Iran.

trying to turn iran into an industrial power he overplayed his hand i was overthrown and the islamic republic came in and iran has continued to produce oil but often under uh under sanctions which have limited the amount of oil that it can export

And in the last few years, it's been really exporting oil at a discount to countries like China.

So it's not a big player in the way that it historically had been.

I still think back to when Iran and Saudi Arabia were almost in a battle to see who could produce more oil.

But those days are long past.

What Iran recognizes by shutting the Strait of Hormuz gives it enormous leverage on the world economy and really shutting off a significant supply of oil in which the world depends.

Well, there's certainly the gatekeeper.

20% of world oil normally would go through the Strait of Hormuz.

We've also learned, you know, if we had been talking on February 27th and I said to you, oh, the Strait of Hormuz is going to be closed, you would have said, well, that's probably going to affect oil.

You might have said it's going to affect natural gas, but you wouldn't have said it's going to affect petrochemicals, helium, fertilizer, metal exports, because really those Gulf Arab countries have become so integrated into the world economy on a much bigger scale than was anticipated.

But right now, what Iran is doing is by shutting, trying to change the Strait of Hormuz into an Iranian canal for which you pay tolls.

What they are trying to do, what they're doing is, if this continues for another month, will create shortages that will be felt all across the world, will affect air travel, will affect agriculture, will affect the production of semiconductors.

So they have a lot of leverage as long as they control the strait.