Jason Bordoff

And then you have major pieces.

President Trump a few days ago threatened to attack Karg Island, which is this major piece of energy infrastructure that is responsible for most of Iran's oil exports.

If that were attacked, we know what Iran would do in response.

They would attack an important piece of energy infrastructure somewhere else.

In 2019, the Houthis attacked Abqaiq, this critical oil installation in Saudi Arabia.

And it was remarkable how quickly the Saudis could get that back up and running.

But the damage could have been much worse.

And so if you do something like that, you could see millions of barrels a day of disruption that we haven't seen yet.

By the way, Saudi was exporting about 7 million barrels a day before this.

And now they're getting to four or five through a pipeline to bypass the Strait of Hormuz and send it to the Red Sea.

There's a port called Yanbu in the Red Sea.

That's vulnerable.

And we saw what the Houthis could do to tankers in the Red Sea not too long ago.

We haven't seen attacks there yet.

So if that sort of energy infrastructure is damaged, again, coming back to the attack on Qatar a week ago, the Qataris have said for the roughly 20% of their project that was damaged, it's going to take three to five years to repair.

Maybe they can do it in two to three, but that's not weeks or months.

So given how much this conversation has been about the physical constraints and choke points like the Strait of Hormuz, I would recommend that people read an excellent book called Ed Conway's Material World, which is a really great reminder of how important things we never think about like copper and sand are to the global economy.

We don't think about it until something breaks.

And what that book makes clear and what this moment is illustrating, I think, in real time is just how dependent we are on all of those materials that we take for granted.

I put that alongside a book called More, More, and More by Jean-Baptiste François.