Ezra Klein

Do you think this is in the long run an accelerant of global clean energy transition simply because it creates less dependencies on some of these traditional players?

Or does it just create new dependencies like on China or on whomever you get your electricity piped in from such that that does not offer itself as an answer?

And how about Iran itself?

Right now, as we're speaking, it does not look likely to me that Trump and Netanyahu are going to succeed in their initial goal of regime change.

And if you are the Iranian regime that survives this, under whatever conditions, that might be true.

It's not going to be a disarmed regime.

We're not going to have the boots on the ground that would be necessary to make that possible.

You think about the weaponry that Hamas was able to smuggle into Gaza when it was encircled by Israel, and there's going to be no level of control over Iran that is anything like that.

If you're that Iranian regime, it seems to me what you have learned is that your best defense, aside from eventually getting a nuclear weapon—

is your ability to close down the Strait of Hormuz.

That you want to be putting a huge amount of your effort and national defense strategy

in figuring out how to threaten the regional energy supply through, you know, attacking the energy systems of other Gulf states and through closing down the Strait.

And so in sort of forcing Iran into this position,

You might have really forced it into a position where it is going to figure out how to make sure they can wield the energy weapon even more effectively in the future, thus creating better deterrence against its enemies.

I'm curious how you think about that from an energy weapon perspective.

Yeah, it's going to make our allies quite thrilled with us.

Building is a policy choice.

So it seems to me that there are now two pathways for Donald Trump in this war.

One is in the quite near term, in the next days or week or two, to simply say, my goal here was to reduce much of the regime's offensive capability to rubble, to destroy their Navy.

We've done it.