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Chapter 1: What are David Frum's initial thoughts on the war in Iran?
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Hello, and welcome to The David Fromm Show. I'm David Fromm, a staff writer at The Atlantic.
My guest this week will be Graham Wood, my Atlantic colleague and author of two important recent articles in The Atlantic, one about Iran's ability to continue to inflict economic damage on Saudi Arabia and the other oil-producing states, and the other, well, a really delightful piece called Snorkeling in the Strait of Hormuz about Graham's adventures going swimming in that body of water that is the center of the world's attention.
Graham is a courageous, inventive, ingenious, and perceptive writer, and it's a delight to be able to talk to him on The David Frum Show. My book this week will be Common Sense by Thomas Paine, published 250 years ago this year, and worthy of urgent rereading on this anniversary occasion.
But before my discussion with either Graham Wood or my reading of Common Sense, some preliminary thoughts about the war that continues to rage between the United States and Iran, now finishing its first month, entering month two. We're in a strange information blackout about the war. There is so much that we hear, so little that we see, and so little that we can know for sure.
We don't see the evidence of it, but from everything we read, the United States and Israel have inflicted devastating damage on Iranian military and economic targets. How fateful this damage is, how consequential remains on Syria, but it must be very extreme.
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Chapter 2: What experiences did Graeme Wood have while reporting from Dubai?
At the same time, the war seems to be progressing in ways that are not so favorable to the United States. The price of oil is up and American confidence in the war is down.
And there seems to be no plan in the Trump administration to bring the war to an end on any of the terms that you might have thought America would have wanted, including permanent denuclearization of Iran and the free flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz.
I think as I try to understand what, if anything, is going wrong, the Trump administration seems to have taught Iran how to defeat the Trump administration through the Trump administration's own words. One of the things that Trump has made very clear to the Iranians is how low his threshold for economic pain is. Every time he tries to jawbone the energy markets,
by making some statement just before the energy markets open that he hopes will lead to lower trades as soon as they do open, jawboning that worked at first and that now seems to be ceasing to be working. He is teaching the Iranians that if bad things happen in the energy market, Trump can't take it. I mean, it may be their steel factories that are blowing up.
It may be their leaders who are being killed.
But it is Trump who seems to be showing more signs of panic and fear as he loses control of the situation and as he responds by making threats to escalate more in ways that create for him the alternative either backing away from threats made, maybe he doesn't take Karg Island after all, or escalating into a ground war with Iran for which he has no permission from Congress, no mandate from the American people, probably not the resources to do, and certainly no political permission to suffer the pain of.
Iran can read Western media as well as any of us can, and they can see the panic and terror of economic dislocation that is being broadcast by the Trump administration to the world. If Trump wanted to fight a war in the Persian Gulf, one of the things you would think he would need to do would be to explain to the American people why the economic pain that must follow is worth it.
He's never done that. He promised them no economic pain.
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Chapter 3: How is the war affecting the global energy market?
And every Sunday night before markets open on Monday mornings in Asia and the rest of the world, he tries to incant some formula to keep things at bay for at least a few minutes. And as I said, at first that worked. He bought a few minutes piece. Recently, he seems to have stopped working. He's no longer buying a few minutes piece. But the economic realities are the economic realities.
And incredibly, the much weaker party to the war, Iran, seems to be able to inflict pain that the stronger party to the war, the United States and its ally Israel, and especially the United States, can't seem to bear. Trump seems to think of wars as exercises in destruction. He doesn't accept that there are exercises in politics.
And many of the people around him take pride in saying, we're not doing any nation building. We're not thinking about what comes after. We're not worrying about permanent regimes. We're just here to kill bad guys. But killing bad guys is very seldom an end in itself. At some point, the killing has to stop.
Chapter 4: What insights does Graeme Wood provide about snorkeling in the Strait of Hormuz?
And at some point, you have to deal with whatever is left. And that point will come earlier rather than later, and maybe earlier than the United States can afford for that point to come. If the United States has not given Americans any inkling of the pain that was likely to be headed their way, any reason for it, any reason to hope that things will be better after it.
So the Iranians are discovering that if they just inflict economic pain, which they can easily do, they can bring pressure to bear on Trump that is much greater on him than the pressure he is bearing to them by blowing up things and killing bad guys. We don't know how much margin of survival the Iranian regime has. It is, in many ways, a fragile country. It depends on oil exports.
And the United States could interdict those oil exports if it wanted to. But because the United States doesn't have a capacity for plane, it's not interdicting Iranian oil exports.
At the end of a month of war, Iran is exporting not only as much oil as it ever did, as much oil as it did last year, but it's exporting that oil at a higher price, billions and billions of dollars more higher price than it was making before the war started.
And that means that even if the United States were to succeed in reducing Iranian oil exports somewhat, it would not be putting budgetary pressure on the Iranian regime. It's a plan for war without politics. And that's a plan for war without success. and now my dialogue with Graham Wood. But first, a quick break.
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Chapter 5: How does the Trump administration's messaging impact the war's progress?
If Graham Wood's business card does not read international man of mystery, it should. His recent report from the Persian Gulf, snorkeling in the Strait of Hormuz, is Graham at his most characteristic, in the center of the action, seeing things the way no one else sees them, and preserving calm where most of us would see only danger and terror.
A Harvard graduate who now teaches at Yale, an Arabic speaker, Graham began his journalism career as a reporter for the Cambodia Daily. On the outbreak of the Iraq War, he relocated to Iraq and was hired by the Atlantic, where he continues as a colleague to this day.
Graham's deep investigations of the ISIS terror organization generated a viral Atlantic article and were published in book form in 2016, The Way of the Strangers, which won acclaim and awards all over the world, including the Governor General Award of Canada, of which Graham and I are both citizens. For the past two years, Graham has closely studied the Iranian regime.
As Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, Graham has traveled to the region and reported intensely from both sides of the war zone. And it's such a pleasure to welcome Graham to The David Fromm Show today. Graham, thank you for joining me.
David, it's good to be with you.
So let's talk about your snorkeling adventure. For those who have not read this amazing piece of reportage or seen the sprightly video that emerged from it, tell us, what was that day like?
So I had been in Dubai and, you know, missiles were coming in, drones were coming in. And the Strait of Hormuz was more and more in the news because it was being closed. And that's the choke point for about a fifth of the world's seaborne oil.
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Chapter 6: What historical context does Thomas Paine's 'Common Sense' provide for today's events?
And my instinct was just to go see what it looked like. You know, this is an area that I'd crossed before as a ferry passenger, but actually just laying eyes on it when it is the center of the world's attention seemed important. So I just got in a car, drove there and then chartered a Dow.
D-H-O-W, which is one of these old wooden boats that, you know, in normal times, it's there for pleasure cruising. It's there for smuggling. And guess what? Right now, it's really cheap if you want to hire a Dow for a pleasure cruise. And although you made me sound very intrepid by going out there, it was a quiet, beautiful day. There were dolphins. There were damselfish.
And there was no sign at all of a war going on just over the cliffs.
Well, that is because you think of it as even from the energy trade and all the traffic, an area of environmental devastation, even at the best of times. And now it's the middle of a war zone. And it looked like holiday pics from the video you took.
It was.
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Chapter 7: What are the implications of Iran's oil exports during the conflict?
That's exactly what it was. When you're there, of course, because it's closed, the ships are not going back and forth. So it's quiet. In fact, in the strait, I saw lots of these dhows just idling there because it was not a time when you could safely go back and forth to Iran. And usually they'd be going back and forth, mostly speedboats smuggling. But at this point, again, as calm as could be.
So I spent about five hours in the fjords next to the strait. And just a few miles into the Strait itself, and saw, I would guess, fewer than half a dozen boats that were actually going back and forth across the Strait. And of course, I didn't see any evidence that anyone was going through the Strait.
Well, this is one of the ways that this war shocked so many of our ideas about what modern war is like. We are so used to seeing everything, or at least being presented with images that purport to show us everything. And the idea that both combatants, the United States, Israel side on one hand and Iran on the other, would agree to a complete shutdown of imagery.
And then on what is the central economic battlefield, the Persian Gulf, nothing is happening. That's the news.
Chapter 8: How does the episode conclude with reflections on the current geopolitical landscape?
So there are scenes presumably somewhere of extraordinary violence being unleashed. And yet we don't see them. We just see this peaceful blue water.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, right across the street, if you went inland, you'd get to Minab, where there was the school famously destroyed by the United States, which killed possibly hundreds of children. So devastation is not that far away. But if you're not right there... then what you see is calm waters. And also, by the way, you still see some traffic going back and forth.
I mentioned six boats or so that I saw going back and forth. Those are smugglers who just decide that they live outside the law in the best of times. And so right now they're going back and forth. They're bringing...
electronics to iran and in the past they would usually bring goats back apparently so there's still that going on but mostly you just see these calm waters and then dozens upon dozens of boats just waiting for it to be safe to go back in their usual route are iranian tankers able to move uh right now no at that point no that there was there was nothing going back and forth or chinese tankers serving the iran trade i should say i mean there's uh
There's this extraordinary phenomenon going on right now where while there's a lockdown on Persian Gulf oil, Iran has been able to sell actually more than before, mostly going to China. So at the moment, because of expensive oil, Iran, and because of the need of everyone, including the United States, to loosen up the energy markets, Iran has been able to sell oil.
But I mean, going back and forth through the Strait of Hormuz, Right now means you're going under the eyes of Iranian missile launchers as well as the United States. So it would take a pretty brave crew to want to do that.
Now, you referenced lightly your departure from Dubai, but you were under fire there more than in the Gulf.
Yeah, that's right. You know, Dubai at that point, I think it's still the case today. The United Arab Emirates was getting more incoming Iranian drones and missile strikes than than anywhere else. So I was there almost from the very beginning of the war. And you'd hear the interceptions.
I witnessed a couple of the hits and got to see what Dubai looked like, which I think you referenced earlier that the information war here, too, which is. a pretty extraordinary thing to watch on social media when you're in the place that's the subject of the social media speculation.
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