Ezra Klein

lighting the global international order on fire, deposing and capturing presidents of other countries, launched a war with Iran with no consultation functionally of anyone, except maybe Israel.

And the risk to energy security here again was us.

We chose to put energy security at risk.

We seem to have done so without any real planning for what it would mean.

But it reflects something I think which is sort of odd, which is when you think about the conversation that dominated this in the 2000s, we needed to get to a point where America had energy security, where we couldn't be squeezed by OPEC.

And we actually did quite a lot in that direction.

and became a net energy exporter and had this amazing shale gas revolution and began to work on decarbonization.

And then in just the past couple of years, I mean, Trump has destroyed the solar and wind subsidies, is trying as best he can, it seems to me, to set back our work on decarbonization and electrification, and at the same time has executed a series of moves in foreign policy that have created a lot more instability.

in the global economic and political order.

It has been, we have chosen volatility that we have not planned for in a way that is very strange.

What did you tell them?

Tell me about the role and positioning of China in this moment.

Thank you very much.

on being something in between a petro-state and a petro-empire.

A petro-state in that Trump has been gutting the wind and solar subsidies and making permitting harder and, as best I can tell, trying to retard the clean energy transition, but going all out on fossil fuels.

But in addition to that, he has been trying to expand U.S.

influence

And to some degree, control over the fossil fuel reserves of other places.

So Venezuela is the most obvious example here where we functionally took over that country and government and said completely explicitly that we were taking over their oil.

And I think Trump's view of how Iran was going to go was that either he was going to cut a deal with some deputy level in the regime that would be friendlier to the U.S.