Jason Bordoff

The Arab oil embargo in 1973, by contrast, you saw about 6% or 7% of world supply disrupted.

So this is by far the largest energy supply disruption we have ever seen.

What has Iran actually done to close the strait?

I mean, the story of this conflict so far has been the tankers, mostly as a precaution, are just staying in place.

We have seen facilities in the region shut down production as a precaution.

We're still not yet at the point where most energy infrastructure in the region has been physically attacked or damaged.

We're starting to be at risk of seeing that.

Israel attacked a natural gas field in Iran yesterday.

Last week, Iran retaliated by hitting a very important energy installation in Qatar, and it was to send a signal.

It's tit-for-tat escalation.

This is mutually assured destruction.

If you come after me, I can hit you hard, and you'll hurt me, but I'll hurt you in the process.

And so people have mostly been holding back from that.

And that's important because if this conflict somehow is resolved and comes to an end and the strait is reopened—

It might take a few weeks, maybe even a month or two for some of that to come back online and for the energy to start flowing again.

But if we start to see those attacks where we really have physical damage, the Qataris are saying already it'll take three to five years to repair the damage that was done to their facility last week.

If you do that to many other facilities in the region, the consequences of this crisis are going to last much, much longer.

The point about the asymmetric nature of this is really quite striking.

Of course, you have very powerful militaries like the United States and even Israel dropping enormous amounts of munitions on Iran.

Iran has its own military, but it's a much weaker power.