David Frum

Hello, and welcome to The David Fromm Show.

I'm David Fromm, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

My guest this week will be Graham 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 Graham's adventures going swimming in that body of water that is the center of the world's attention.

Graham 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 Graham 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 on Syria, 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 in 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 have thought America would have 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 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.

I mean, it may be their steel factories that are blowing up.

It may be their leaders who are being killed.