The Daily Blast: Trump’s Iran Blunders Suddenly Look Darker as Damning New Leaks Hit

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I'm your host, Greg Sargent. For Donald Trump, the news is getting worse on his war against Iran. A preliminary military report finds that the U.S. was behind the bombing of an Iranian nursery school, killing scores of children.

A new reporting confirms that the Trump team badly miscalculated Iran's response to their invasion, leading to a developing energy fiasco, with some officials growing pessimistic about the lack of a strategy to finish the war. And they were afraid to tell that to the President. Trump is publicly acknowledging none of this.

He just urged oil companies to use the straight-of-war moves regardless of danger, and he's refusing to comment on how he'll know when it's time to end the war.

“So how do we get out of this situation if Trump's unwilling to acknowledge the situation we're in?”

We're posing this question to Elizabeth Saunders, a political scientist that Colombia, who focuses on foreign policy and has a new piece on the huge mess we're in. Elizabeth, good to have you on. Thanks, good to be here. So let's start with the straight-of-harm moves which abuts Iran and connects the Persian Gulf to the wider world.

Can you just define the importance of the straight-of-harm moves and global terms, and how bad is the energy situation right now?

So basically this mess is like turning off the spicket that controls 20% of the world's oil flow.

And it's literally like you have running water, and then it's 20% less, and it's all because of this choke point in the straight-of-war moves. And so the supply is going down, and that sends the price of oil up. And it's not like a normal oil shock where the Saudis or OPEC can get together and you can restart production because these tankers are stuck inside the Persian Gulf.

And the Gulf states have already filled up their storage tanks, and so they have to shut down the oil fields, which are not easy to restart. So this is one of those shocks that is going to be very hard to get back to any sort of status quo before the war. And there's also no ended sight because this isn't like,

“it's not like when the tanker or the container ship that's stuck in the Suez Canal, right?”

Remember, is theboatstuck.com. Once the boat is unstuck, the canal reopens. This is not going to be like that because the Iranians have so much weaponry and power, and they're not going anywhere, because that's where they live. And so you now have basically have 20% of the world's oil flow held hostage, essentially, by Iran.

And this has always been a threat, and one of the big reasons why presidents for 20 years, who have considered striking Iran,

have been deterred from doing so because this is such a dramatic shock to the world economy. Oil is the oil market is global, and so it's not as though we can just pump more oil out of the ground in the US to make up for it. It's a global energy market, and so that's going to drive the price of oil up, and I can't see. I mean, I'm no oil exchange energy market expert, but you know, you make something 20% more scarce. It's clearly going to have an effect, and that doesn't even account for the problem of getting things back online, which will not be necessarily smooth.

“Can you just define the importance of the straight of our moves and global terms, and how bad is the energy situation right now?”

It's pretty bad because 20% of the world's oil flows through the straight of our moves, which is a choke point, 24 miles wide, but really much less than that, because it's so shallow. And the Iranians can target it from the shore, and so tankers have been stuck, and they can't get through. And so this is backing up the world's oil supply, and it's driving up the price of oil, because when things get more scarce, the price goes up. It's the work again, oil prices have gone up around 20% that it's been very volatile, but on average, I think that's sort of the latest estimate.

Cleanly anytime soon.

Well, let's listen to Trump on this for a second. Here, he's asked whether oil companies should use the straight of our moves. Listen.

“Are you talking to this? He knows a various oil companies encouraging them to use the straight of our right. I think they should. I think they should use the straight of our moves.”

I think they should use the straight of our moves. I think they should use the straight of our moves.

I think they should use the straight of our moves.

I think they should use the straight of our moves.

“How big Iran's navy is, which you think he should know as commander and chief, but that aside, what's the story with what you're hearing there? How do you make sense of it?”

What are you things going to happen with the straight? Trump is trying to secure it. He's trying to get oil companies to use it, and even though it puts them in danger, it's a little hard to parse. What do you make of it? To be honest, I think he just has no grasp of what the situation really is. I think he wants brave captains to run the straight of our moves, like in star wars, you know, but the castle run or whatever it is. You want, and I don't mean to make light of it. I mean, it's a dangerous state. He wants these ships to be taking on very dangerous journeys through this very narrow, very shallow straight that may now be have minds.

As he said in that clip that we destroyed all their mining ships. That's the absolutely not true. They may have distributed some of the mines around Iran so that they couldn't be targeted directly in one go. They may have already put some mines in. We don't fully know, but I would say that that is not something that we can just take on Trump's say so. I don't think he has a grasp of this is not something the world and the in particular, the financial world that ensures these ships and the companies that run these ships and the pilots and captain, you know, the people who crew these ships can unsee Iran struck these tankers at least three last count that I saw today. I may already be out of date.

And if you look at these images of tankers on fire, what captain, what company in the right mind would send a tanker laden with fuel through the strength of hormones. It's it's really dangerous. And so there's been talk of this naval escort by the US and the Navy is simply not equipped to do that. And even if it were it really does not want to because it makes the US naval ships a target as well, right. So these ballistic missiles that Iran has could hit, you know, these ships. They can attack them from the shore and they can also mine the street. And this is a problem that, you know, US military planners and analysts, national security analysts and presidential administrations have been thinking about for 20 years.

And every president until Trump has been deterred from doing it are precisely because this is such a mess. Well, it's a good thing we have the art of the deal guy here to figure this out for us. I mean, the time is reports that Trump's team badly misjudged how Iran would respond to the invasion to begin with kind of creating this mess. I want to re-assentance from the Times piece because it's amazing. Quote, inside the administration some officials are growing pessimistic about the lack of a clear strategy to finish the war, but they have been careful not to express that directly to the president who has repeatedly declared that the military operation is a complete success.

“But let's take this in two parts. First, how crazy is it that Trump officials are not allowed or are afraid to talk to him about the situation we're in?”

I mean, it's classic personalistic dictatorship, yes, and behavior.

So it is crazy. And I have written before about how the constraints on Trump, especially in the national security in military force area are basically gone.

But what is interesting is they may not want to tell it to Trump's face, but they're all falling over themselves to weak to the press that it wasn't their idea. They thought it was terrible. We gave him the warnings, right? And not just the ones from the Pentagon before the war, but now, right? And that is quite interesting because it, you know, failure has, what does it victory has as a thousand fathers, but failures in orphan, right? But they're trying to put it in failure at Trump's door and that's one of the problems with being a personalist leader is, you know, things do fall at your door.

very, very, very, very high on the list of things Iran would do. It's its biggest point of leverage, but clearly this was not integrated into the decision making and, you know, it's just the latest incredibly painful and

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I want to pull on the thread that you just sort of laid out there on how this really suggests the people are starting to leak already that, you know,

it wasn't their idea to get into this mess, and they're constrained from telling the desktop, the alien, angry, delusional desktop that we're in a real fix.

“It's just an odd situation. Can you talk a little bit more about how personalist dictatorship rulers tend to create situations like this kind of inherently or structurally?”

That's what's happening, right? Yeah, the combination of the trends in presidential power, long before Trump, but really since then, 11, where we get rid of all the, you know, Congress is delegating all its power to the president. Plus, Trump's intimidation tactics and sort of total control through fear of the Republican Party has essentially meant that the last gasp of constraint that you could have on a president Trump.

Is his inner circle in the second term he's entirely surrounded by yes men and yes women.

And so structurally, it's not so much that they're pushing him toward war. It's that there's nothing to restrain his impulses anymore. And that leads to the other piece of the times reporting, which is the Trump officials got caught off guard by Iran's ability to create a global energy crisis and also that they lack a clear strategy to end the war.

“Those things are kind of connected. The crisis is putting the US in a bad spot, but we can't extricate ourselves. Why not?”

In other words, can we extricate ourselves or not? The lack of a plan to extricate ourselves. This is, this is a recurrent theme in history, right? We are the big power with the best military equipment. They're no one disputes that, but it is very hard to use that to change a regime. To make good on what for the other party is existential, right? To get them to surrender or something that they consider completely central to their existence. That's why the Korea was never going to give up its nukes. Iran was never going to give up its ballistic missiles. Maybe they would have compromised on the nuclear, but apparently the diplomats weren't smart enough, you know, with coffin Kushner, it weren't smart enough to understand what they were getting as an offer from the Iranians on the nuclear front.

But Vietnam, Afghanistan, you could, you know, you could make a list of all the countries that have failed to use their superior military power against a determined, militarily inferior enemy who just has to last, right?

If they did and he went ahead anyway, I mean, he doesn't have any grasp of history, he just thinks he can make it so. So then he gets the question of can we extricate ourselves. So with the tariffs, he could say 20% tariff today and then back off, right?

“Leading aside the legality of doing that, right? And he clearly thinks that is what will happen here, that he can just choose the moment where he wants to undo and go back to the way it was.”

Leading aside all the other reasons why that's probably not possible, such as trust in the US.

The Israelis might not be ready to stop, like just assume all those problems are solvable. What you have now is the straight-of-war moves has become militarized in a way that it wasn't before. It's not clear that Iran will stop shooting if they feel that it's necessary for them to keep the war going for international reasons for domestic reasons. And so the world cannot unsee that global markets can't unsee that ship captains can't unsee that.

So it's not clear to me that he can make the shooting stop by magic.

It's not clear to me that if the shooting stops, you would immediately see traffic through the straight-of-war moves go back to normal immediately.

“I think you're going to have a Trump premium on the oil coming through the straight-of-war moves for a long time.”

And you see a scenario by which this war ends, is there some way that he, I don't know, in the next week or in the next two weeks or in the next three weeks or in the next few days maybe, says something like, okay, they've unconditionally surrendered.

They haven't said that, but they've unconditionally surrendered in the sense that we have debilitated their forces enough that they can't do anything to us anymore.

So we're going to pull out. Is there a scenario like that? I think that Trump thinks that there is. I think he thinks he can stop shooting and then, and then everybody will take their toys and go home. And that, you know, one could argue that that's impossible for all the reasons we've already discussed that Iran may have its own reasons to want to, you know, punish the people, Gulf states that hosted all these American bombers and so forth. And really show the world it still is around in me as business. You can't unsee what's happened in the straight-of-war moves. But then the other, there's another sort of less obvious reason why it really do not think such a scenario is possible. And that is that we have lost at Trump's Trump and Mark Rubio's hand.

Huge amount of our diplomatic capacity. We do not have the expertise in the region. We don't have the ambassadors in post in the region. We don't have competent people at the sort of level at the state department that you need to go in and try and, you know, martial allies and deal with some of these like, you know, attacks on neighbors that Gulf, Gulf partners that didn't expect to be attacked and need reassurance. And there's fall out from this terrible terrible strike on the school that looks to be an error.

I do believe it wasn't intentional, although the way Trump has handled it has been pre-horfying, but that will also have raised some concerns and sensitivities in the region, not just in Iran, right? It's horrific.

“If stuff like that happens, you have to get your diplomats engaged. It's a form of power. It's not a weakness.”

Diplomacy is not the opposite of war. It's part of how you fight a war and how you end a war. And so I don't think that there's a scenario where Trump can unilaterally declare that the war is over. Well, Elizabeth, you mentioned the school, the Times also reports that an ongoing military investigation has concluded that the U.S. is responsible for blowing up the Iranian school and had scores of children in it. If confirmed, this is the worst U.S. atrocity directed at civilians in decades. Is it not?

Trump was asked about this conclusion. He said he didn't know about it, which is odd because he'd think he'd want to know about it. Elizabeth, how do you think about this part of it in the larger context here and to wrap up? How do we get out of this? If I knew that, I would be trading oil futures right now. So the answer to that is, I do not know. On the school, it's a horrendous tragedy and not to minimize it in this lightest.

It just makes me shudder every time I even think about it. But as with any situation like this, it's how you handle it afterwards, that really is also very important. Not only is he not trying to mitigate the fallout. He's pouring fuel on the fire by implying somehow it was a run that got Tom Hawks, but where would they have gotten the Tom Hawks from, you know, I mean, it's a big snow sense. Like it's just transparently.

“I don't even want to say a lie because he's it's more like he's just making it up, right?”

He did finally say at the end of one of the press conferences I saw maybe yesterday that if they do a investigation he'll accept that. I don't think that he'll have any choice but to implicitly accept that.

But again, he's making a terrible terrible situation worse and his inability to conduct any sort of diplomacy at any level is harming the his own ability to prosecute the war, right?

“He will not you will have a harder time declaring victory and going home because he's not using American diplomatic resources and in fact has dismantled them.”

Well Elizabeth Sonders, your piece at the Good Authority website is all about that and folks should check it out if you enjoyed this conversation.

Elizabeth, thank you so much for coming on. It was a great pleasure to talk to you.

Thank you.

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