Ezra Klein

in order to not have their head be the next one on a pike or not have their home be the next one hit by a missile.

or there was going to be a bottom-up Iranian revolution, and they'd be so grateful to him that the resulting regime would be friendlier to U.S.

interests and would sort of deal with us on better terms.

And in either case, you would now have America with its tremendous energy exporting potential, Trump's incredibly close relationships with different Gulf state countries like Saudi Arabia, and then you'd add in Venezuela and Iranian oil, gas, et cetera, and that would give us a lot of power.

And China...

has been, as you say, electrifying at a really torrid pace, but developing functionally dominance

over the clean energy supply chain.

It is very, very hard to beat what they can do on cost.

The Biden administration put huge tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles and Chinese solar power components and so on.

But practically, as America becomes a less viable partner for many countries that want to have a clean energy transition, I think they are rethinking and in some cases have actually changed course.

And so China seems to be betting a lot on becoming the supplier of the global electric state.

So first, I want to see how much in that rendering of the two major energy strategies you disagree with.

And then second, given where, as an energy expert, the world looks to be going to you, how you would think about those two strategies.

I'm interested in what you think that could mean for the long term.

So you go back to the oil shock of the 1970s and you have a major effort to find efficiency because there's not a straightforward and viable alternative for what energy you would use to run the global economy.

And so you have Jimmy Carter telling the country to turn down the thermostat and put on a sweater.

Right now, you have been in this period where we've seen a tremendous transition to solar, to wind, to geothermal, to batteries, to other kinds of things.

And it's 2026.

In the last five years, you've seen two tremendous geopolitical shocks to global energy flows.

So as somebody who studies clean energy transition, which mostly we've talked about in terms of climate change,