Jason Bordoff

But again, it doesn't take that much to throw the entire global energy market into chaos.

And that's what they're doing.

So they're not just hitting neighbors, although the neighbors are being harmed.

Iraq, some other countries, if you run out of places to store the daily production of oil that you have and you can't get it into market and put it on a ship to sell it somewhere, you have to shut in production.

You just have to stop producing.

And we've seen about seven, eight, nine million barrels a day of oil globally just shut in where people say we're going to stop producing.

So that hurts those countries.

But we are in a global oil market.

If there's a disruption halfway around the world, you take one, two, 10 million barrels off, the global price of oil goes up.

And as we are seeing in the United States, for everyone listening who goes to fill up at the pump, the price of the pump is set by the global price of oil, even though the United States is now a huge net exporter and the largest producer in the world.

So the pain Iran is inflicting is global in scope because they can affect the global energy market.

And that's true for natural gas as well, which particularly hurts Europe and Asia because that's where those supplies go.

Why?

Well, I can't speak to what kind of planning went on, obviously, in the Trump administration before this started.

You do have a sense that they thought this would be over much more quickly.

Other recent conflicts have been.

We woke up on a Saturday morning and found out we removed the leader of Venezuela, and that seemed to be over a few days later.

There was conflict in the Middle East last year, the 12-day war between Israel and Iran, and it was only 12 days.

So there may have been excessive optimism that things would change in Iran quite quickly, whatever the objective of this action is, regime change or something else.

And the other thing that I think you want to do in the situation like you're describing, because you're right, closing the Strait of Hormuz is the mother of all nightmare scenarios for global energy markets, not to mention for other military and defense markets.