Hussein Ibish

And also...

If it's, you know, their own petroleum or oil bound for China and Japan and Korea and India, then yeah, go ahead.

You're buying our oil.

But that's not normal.

I think they could try to run it or organize convoys.

But no, I think the US can probably do as much as the Iranians have done to spook shipping and transport and create the same kind of uncertainty.

that has impeded traffic for most shippers on the non-Iranian ledger.

Now, the problem is, how long can the global marketplace endure this, right?

What is the economic ramification for the global markets?

Iran does not care about the global markets.

Washington does.

Washington is very plugged in.

Washington's allies and partners and trading partners are all

very worried about this.

Iran is the kind of outsider here.

And so it's possible that the Iranians will calculate that they can survive a month of a blockaded port altogether more easily than the global economy.

So it becomes another weird face-off.

Yeah, it's the great weakness of the policy is that it may be more costly to the global economy than it is to the Iranian economy.

Well, look, here's what I think.

Another thing that Donald Trump has probably convinced the Iranian government of is that they need to get hold of a nuclear weapon as soon as possible because they will be contrasting their recent experience at the hands of the US and Israel, plus that of Saddam Hussein's Iraq, plus that of Muammar Gaddafi's Libya, with the way in which Donald Trump and others treat North Korea.