David Frum

As I understand the math of the Persian Gulf, it's 20% of the world's oil, or as you correct me, correct me, ship-borne oil.

Yep.

There's a lot of oil moves by land.

80% of that oil moves to East Asia, not just China, but Japan, South Korea, others, but China being the single largest consumer.

But there's only one world price.

So it's not like the United States can shrug it off.

And that whatever happens, Americans pay at the pump because even if you buy 100% American-made fuel, that 100% American-made fuel is priced according to whatever the world price is according to the marginal buyer.

Because the Chinese could also buy from, so long as we have any kind of free market in energy, if the Persian Gulf is closed, then they're more bidders for American oil or for oil from Norway or from other suppliers.

So there's one price, even though 80% of the Persian Gulf soil flows to East Asia.

Well, there are two other sort of more radical thoughts on the energy market that I come away with as watching this.

And clearly, these are things that can't be done today or tomorrow or they're a decade work.

But if you look just at the map,

The distance from the Persian Gulf to Haifa in Israel, all the way through Saudi territory, is not greater than the pipeline that Saudi Arabia built from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea.

They went to the trouble of building a diversionary canal or pipeline that

allows them to export via the Red Sea.

That is past the Houthis in Yemen.

But you could also build a pipeline to Israel and go through the Mediterranean and be surrounded by friendly people the whole way.

They didn't do that for political reasons, I assume.

And meanwhile, in the past decade, the United States, under two Trump administrations with a not very effective Biden administration between, has made very little progress moving away from petroleum, moving itself and moving the world away from petroleum,

when we've had a decade of opportunity and technology that enabled us to do that if we were minded to do it.