Graham Wood (6:37)

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David Frum (7:19)

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 Ward 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.

Graham Wood (8:25)

It's good to be with you.

David Frum (8:26)

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?

Graham Wood (8:37)

So I had been in Dubai, and 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. And my instinct was just to go see what it looked like. 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. So I just got in a car, drove there, and then chartered a dhow. Dhow, 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 dao for a pleasure cruise. And although you made me sound very intrepid by going out there, it was a quiet, beautiful day. There was dolphins, there were damselfish, and there was no sign at all of a war going on just over the cliffs.

David Frum (9:38)

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.

Graham Wood (9:53)

It was. That's exactly what it was. You know, 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.

David Frum (10:34)

Well, this. 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. 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.

Graham Wood (11:07)

Yeah, exactly. I mean, right across the strait, if you went inland, you 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, 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, you know, 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.

David Frum (11:55)

Are Iranian tankers able to move right now?

Graham Wood (11:59)

No, at that point, no, there was nothing going back and forth.

David Frum (12:02)

Or Chinese tankers serving the Iran trade, I should say.

Graham Wood (12:05)

I mean, 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.

David Frum (12:43)

Now, you referenced lightly your departure from Dubai. But you were under fire there more than in the Gulf.

Graham Wood (12:48)

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, you know, I think you referenced earlier, 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. So there's a lot of discussion of how Dubai was quote, unquote, over, that the model was finished and that people were fleeing, there were refugees at the border, and that was a mismatch from what I saw while there. There was certainly fewer people who were going there as holidaymakers, but the place was mostly functioning as it used to, but with some booms in the background.

David Frum (13:43)

Now Dubai doesn't have the network of bomb shelters that Israel, which is receiving also a lot of Iranian attack has. So what do people do for safety when the booms begin?

Graham Wood (13:52)

Well, at that point, and the numbers aren't that much higher so far, the number of reported dead in the entire country is still in the single digits. So in general, it wasn't as if there were explosions happening that were causing mass casualties. But yeah, there's nothing you can do. If a place is not built as a security state the way Israel has had to be, then you just go on with life. And so I went to shopping malls, supermarkets, restaurants, and all of it was just still going on. There weren't even missile alerts that would cause people to go scrambling. You know, like in Ukraine, there were these apps that would tell you when a missile was incoming and before too long, people would just ignore those in a lot of cities because they happen so frequently and they, and Dubai seemed to have skipped right ahead to that stage. So even two days after the war had begun, it seemed like nobody was heeding any of those alerts whatsoever and life was proceeding.

David Frum (14:46)

Now, your most recent article for the Atlantic, Mutually Assured Energy Destruction, suggests that what's going on here is a kind of deterrence actually between the United States and Iran, where neither is hitting quite as hard as it potentially could. I mean, Dubai is a high rise city full of, as you say, shopping malls. There are a lot of dense human targets if you were seeking to maximize the infliction of loss of life. I assume the Iranians even in their depleted state, could do more than they're doing. Do you have a sense that this is an inability on their part, or are they still fighting this war in some ways with one hand tied behind their back?

Graham Wood (15:21)

I think the latter. I mean, a enormous skyscraper is not a, it's not built as a military target. If you want to take down the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, it would be very difficult to stop Iran from doing that if it wanted to concertedly send a fleet of drones to do so. One thing that I think has been saving Dubai in particular though, is that its cosmopolitanism is part of its shield. There are Iranians there, hundreds of thousands of Iranians who are in the Emirates. There are Russians, there are Chinese. So if they were to destroy one of those malls that I said was operating at lower capacity but still operating, they would definitely be a bunch of Russian, Chinese and Iranian body parts strewn about. So the Iranians, if they really wanted to destroy Dubai, they could do so, but they haven't. And that, as you mentioned, goes for infrastructure as well. If they really wanted to hit oil infrastructure in the Gulf hard, I think they could do much more damage than they already had, but there would be consequences for their doing that.

David Frum (16:22)

They also presumably have a lot of their money in Dubai banks.

Graham Wood (16:25)

Oh yeah.

David Frum (16:26)

I mean, even they being the Iranians,

Graham Wood (16:28)

I should say, yeah, the Iranians have their money and their, their people. And I, I don't just mean Iranian people who have gone there for work, but Muscat, Oman, which is also Oman, has also been hit, and Dubai have a lot of Iranians who have just fled there because they considered it a safer place to be than Iran, possibly not aware that, that Iran would soon be attacking them. So it's been a place of refuge for money and for people for some time, even high level people. So yeah, it would be. It's complicated for Iran to strike a place that's also a place of refuge for its own people and its allies.

David Frum (17:01)

A decade ago, you wrote this remarkable article that became an acclaim book, Getting Inside the Mind of isis. You've been doing some of that similar work with the Iranian regime, trying to get inside their brains. Anything that has happened since in the past month of conflict to change any of your perspectives or enrich your thinking as compared to where you were a month ago.

Graham Wood (17:23)

You know, there's one thing that's happened which was the death of Ayatollah Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran for the last 30 plus years. His death was, you know, the rhetoric of it was martyrdom, but also the fact that he almost presented himself as a target in the sense that he was living apparently above ground in his own compound and doing so at a time when it was pretty clear the Israelis or Americans were going to try to assassinate him. That brought back a lot of the rhetoric of martyrdom that that one had heard throughout the history of the Islamic Republic. And it brought it back after a period of, I would say, not quite abeyance, but de emphasis. I would say that unlike isis, if you look at the actions and the policies of the Islamic Republic over the last few decades, Iran has been much more rational, much more strategic, and much less motivated by some of the ideological aspects that they were so fervent in embracing in the beginning of the Islamic Republic. And ISIS was fervent up until the end. So when you see someone sort of offering himself up for martyrdom, then you go back to thinking about all the rhetorical emphasis on the martyrdom of the early imams in Shia Islam. So the martyrdom of Hussein, for example, which, again, I wouldn't have thought of that as an operational concept, but there's a bit of that that I see in this war. And with the death of the supreme

David Frum (18:58)

leader, I think going into this war, a lot of people in the United States and in the United States government assumed that the Iranian state, state had become a very rickety state. The ideology didn't move anybody anymore. The extraordinary sacrifices of the regime that occurred during the Iran Iraq war of the 1980s, those days were over, and one hard blow, the whole structure would collapse. That's turned out to be obviously not true. Do you have any opinion on the prevalence of this kind of ideology of martyrdom or other aspects of regime ideology before the war?

Graham Wood (19:29)

And I think still actually would have said that that ideology had largely run out of gas in Iran at the very beginning. It was almost impossible to overstate in the early days of the revolution in the 1980s, how much it was part of what people were thinking. And to some degree, there are people who even have kind of memory holds some of the things they were saying about, say, Ayatoll Khomeini possibly being this kind of quasi messianic figure, the Hidden Imam himself, which nobody believes anymore, and people pretend they never believed. But there's been a long period of kind of strategic bureaucratization that has washed away a lot of the ideological stuff and fewer and fewer people who believe it. But the last time I was in Tehran was in 2009, and I went to Regime rallies. And I met lots of people who were still very enthusiastic about this belief. Now granted, many of them seem to have been bused in from the countryside, so they were not the cosmopolitan Tehrani types. But they do exist. They do exist in the country. And I would say that there's possibly a double digit percentage of Iranians who still feel that way. So it's not exhausted. But I don't think it would be wrong to say that the country as a whole has lost that faith and has moved on to another phase in its development.

David Frum (20:49)

So there are people in your estimation? And again, it's, it's a very dark box and it's been a while since you had access to the country. But it does seem there are people who would bear arms to defend the regime if Americans landed on Iranian soil.

Graham Wood (21:03)

Yes, yes, no doubt. And I mean, in addition to the IRGC there, which is, you know, the main regime loyalist military element, there are millions of Iranians who are part of the families of irg, irgc, millions of people whose livelihoods depend on the regime as the regime remaining intact. And I would not be surprised, I mean, every Iranian I speak to, no matter what their view of things, says that a lot of these people are going to fight until the last drop of blood.

David Frum (21:33)

The United States has been studying the Iran problem very intensely for a long time. Even before the Iranian Revolution of 1979, people worried, or Americans worried about the aggressive intentions that the Shah of Iran might have. I think some of the war gaming to defend Kuwait began with the idea that the Shah might be the aggressor, not the Iraqis and not yet the Iranian regime. Since the hostage crisis of 1979-80, again, the United States has intensely war gamed it. You assume there was a lot of deep knowledge of the Iranian system inside the United States government. Yet the past month has not been very reassuring that the taxpayer is getting the Iran knowledge the taxpayer may have thought the taxpayer was paying for.

Graham Wood (22:12)

Yeah, I mean, there are few wars that have been more intensely planned, as you say, war gamed out than a war against Iran. I think the fact that that's the case should make us maybe a little bit analytically humble about what's gone on so far because any war that's been planned out is planned out in phases. That is, there's a stage one, a stage two and a stage three. I would say whatever stage one is, it hasn't gone that far. Well, but we have to be cautious about judging phase one or stage one against what may be objectives that were reserved for stage two or three. Now what do I mean by that? It seems like we have so far almost no plan for leadership change, for regime change. And that may be because that's another, that's a stage that possibly will never get to, but possibly that was planned for, for a later point in this war. So I'm a little bit cautious about just saying that the war looks like incompetence because some of the overall objectives have not been met. But there's plenty to criticize in what's already happened that's apparent right before our eyes.

David Frum (23:20)

Yeah, I didn't use the word incompetence. I talked about lack of understanding of Iranian society. Because let me test a hypothesis on you, which is phase one. Let's suppose the military objectives, military track of this war is going well, that the United States and Israel are destroying the things they wanted to destroy. They obviously are having great success finding the people they want to find and eliminating them from the chessboard. Maybe the mistake was a lack of understanding, a lack of study of the American side of the equation when beginning in 19, whenever the serious study of the Iran of Iran war began in 1979-80, the assumption I would guess would be that Iran would have done something really bad. Capture American hostages and detain them for a year and under horrible conditions or something else really bad. And the President would go on TV and explain to the American people why the United States was going to war with Iran. He'd go to Congress and get a vote from Congress. Congress would give it because Iran had done something bad. And then there would be a month long air campaign followed by whatever phase two was and everyone would understand you're fighting in the Middle east, in the Persian Gulf, there's going to be economic hardship and we would all bear it because Iran had done something so very, very bad. The mistake here was what if there was no reason to go to war that week and the American people's pain threshold was literally zero. So none of the obvious moves that Iran would do, closing the straits, interfering with the price of, with the shipping of oil, none of them was there any appetite for in the United States. And the United States then had to conduct whatever phases of this war there are without any ability to take not only casualties but even any economic hardship that may be the missing piece. And that's not the fault of the war gamers because they all assumed right. The reason the President gave us the go order was something bad had happened that we had to respond to. Not the President had a Mood and we're going to war with no permission from the society, no vote from Congress, and no ability to accept any degree of economic pain.

Graham Wood (25:12)

There is a total failure so far in political messaging, very little explanation of what's going on, why it has to happen now. And that's messaging both to Americans and to Iranians. By the way, the Iranian people, especially in Tehran, where they've suffered by far the worst of the bombing, they're not really sure if the United States and Israel really cares about them and really cares about some other objectives, such as just destroying the capability of whatever Iranian state exists, whether it's a friendly one or an unfriendly one. So all of that messaging takes pre planning and it takes the development of some, some faith in what the administration and the military is saying. And that's made us as Americans pretty vulnerable to Iranian propaganda. I mean, I know Americans who I think of as pretty sophisticated consumers of information who are repeating to me falsehoods that are stated by Iranian propaganda. Why are they doing that? Why are they susceptible people? It's because there's no one on the American side who they can credibly turn to and then say, ah, okay, well this person explained why that's not the case. So there's a horrible vulnerability that could have been averted if there was just some faith and rapport developed between the administration and the American people, the administration and the press. And as we know, that rapport has been completely destroyed. And, and in the information war, that's a big problem.

David Frum (26:43)

And it's not just a matter of communications. Politicians like to blame communications advisors as if communications were magic. But communications can't be better than the thing communicated. So if the United States is embarking on a major war with Iran, there'd better be a reason. And you can't just message the reason. You actually have to have the reason. And not just a reason for going to war with Iran in general, but going to war with Iran last week of February of 2026, why was that the time? What, what was different? And if there was a belief, for example, that Iran was making a lot of progress in its missile program at that point or had re re energized the nuclear program that seemed to have been so damaged last summer, that's something you have to say and say it not just to on TV but to Congress, and none of that was done raising the suspicion. The reason it's not done is maybe it wasn't true.

Graham Wood (27:31)

Yeah, I mean this has been a long term problem with, with not Just this administration, but any previous administration's plans or policies about war in Iran, which is that the Iranian progress is incremental, and war is not incremental. War is a. Is a great big thing. And if Iran is slowly developing ballistic missile capabilities, if it's slowly developing drone capabilities, then at what point is the exact moment when the United States should do something about it? And every president before Trump has decided that that exact moment was postponable. And they may have been right. I mean, they all, in that sense, get an A grade because there was no war, there was no nuclear weapon in Iran, and so they can hand it on off to their predecessor. But anytime the war was going to happen, it was going to have to happen, you know, as a kind of judgment call about an accumulation of things, rather than one thing that could be pointed to it.

David Frum (28:26)

Now, when I think about what Trump may be trying to do in the most giving him the highest level of credit, and this is not credit in the sense of moral credit, just intellectual credit, he may have been convinced, or he may believe that lots and lots of people in the upper reaches of the Iranian regime are crooks rather than fanatics. And if you can identify the fanatics and kill enough of them, eventually your shovel will clink on the treasure chest. That is the level of crooks. You will open the treasure chest, find your crooks, and then you can do business with them. Not in a way that will bring satisfaction to the people of Iran, whom we're ostensibly trying to help, although Trump has never been very empathic on that subject. But you bring together a degree of crooked leaders, as happened in Venezuela, as I think is the plan in Cuba, you empower the crooks, you can do business with them, they'll do what they're told in order to keep their money, and then they become less of a nuisance. From a strategic point of view, does that make any sense? And based on your interactions with upper elite Iranians, does any of that plan make any sense?

Graham Wood (29:28)

I think there are a couple things that he might have been surprised by if that was the plan. One is how deep you have to dig before you get to the clink that almost anybody who was in the inner circle of Iranian politics was going to be very difficult to work with because they had not just blood on their hands, but they had been at the intersection of many different types of immoral activity. That's kind of irredeemable in some way. So that's the first thing. I have also spoken to Iranian exiles who have asked why that Wasn't the policy. Why wasn't he constantly looking for digging deep enough to find someone he could work with? Because they say, actually, it seems like he's not looking for that at all. He's just digging and digging and digging and trying to disappoint, discard as much of the regime as possible. And that is why everybody's fighting to the death, is because it appears that the only resolution that the United States would be happy with would be some kind of complete scalping of the regime to a very deep level in its replacement with the Shah, or something like that. And they say if the United States had just announced pretty early on, or found a way pretty early on to get someone in the regime to defect, then they actually would have possibly been able to do that with a lot less loss of life. So it's possible that they're looking for someone who can be compromised like that, but they're digging pretty deep and killing a lot of people before they're coming to someone they're satisfied with.

David Frum (30:59)

And their message to the Iranian regime seems to be completely incoherent, which is, we want unconditional surrender. We want you to negotiate a deal. Yes, you can keep control of the Strait of Hormuz, which we just annexed. No, you can't. Do you think the messaging direct to the Iranians, through whatever channel is going, is any more clear than the message to the world that we're all hearing a contradictory version of every single day?

Graham Wood (31:20)

I mean, I think part of this is just a kind of controlled chaos of negotiation, which is the mode that Trump seems to prefer. So, understandably, we listen to what the President of the United States says, when he says what he'd be satisfied with. But then, of course, we have to remember that this president doesn't seem to know himself what he would be satisfied with. And so we can't quite take that as a direct negotiating position. Like today, Trump said that the current leaders of the regime are people he can work with. And do we take that at face value? Which sounds a lot like the democratic aspirations of the Iranian people matter not one bit to him.

David Frum (32:00)

Today is Monday, March 30th, the day you and I are recording, right?

Graham Wood (32:03)

As oil markets open up, he says there's people at the top we can deal with, which would cause the hearts of Iranian democrats, who have, of course, lost 30,000 people very recently, to sink. But then again, it may also be that if you're opening negotiation, which he is with someone, then you don't want to say at the beginning of Negotiation, there's no negotiation. That can happen because then negotiation stops. So again, there's weird and conflicting messaging that we're getting and it might just reflect the weird and conflicting thoughts of our commander in chief.

David Frum (32:38)

Yeah. Or it may reflect a desire to manipulate energy markets.

Graham Wood (32:41)

Yes, that's what the Iranians have said. Is Kalibov, who's thought to be kind of the day to day operator of the Iranian state, said. Yeah, Trump cares a lot about energy markets and so should disregard a lot of what he says. Sounds wise to me, actually.

David Frum (32:57)

Yeah. And the energy markets as last week, seem to often buy it and they seem to respond positively when Trump said something. And one of the things that seems significant today, Monday, March 30, is Trump said something reassuring and then the energy markets ceased to buy it. They don't believe it anymore.

Graham Wood (33:13)

Yeah, I mean, a lot of what's happening right now is there's an accumulation of problems, there's realities that become more real as time goes by. The Strait of Hormuz, of course, it could be opened up and it would flow just like it always did if there was some agreement that could be reached. But now, of course, the markets are starting to have to price in exactly how much damage was done to Clutter's gas infrastructure, exactly how much damage is likely to be done if there's an escalation of the war to Saudi Arabia, to Kuwait and so forth. So these become more real as the aspect of the war fails to find a resolution.

David Frum (33:52)

Because as you reported in mid March, it's amazing how much damage to oil production, to energy production on the southern side of the Gulf has not yet happened to Saudi Arabia, to Kuwait, to the Gulf state, to the other Gulf states, that Iran has not yet hit them as hard as it imaginably could.

Graham Wood (34:09)

Yeah, I mean, I've been reporting for the last week or so about exactly what a hard hit to that energy infrastructure of Saudi Arabia. And it would look like. And there are particular nodes where if you hit them, it takes years to recover. And taking that much oil and gas offline, it's almost impossible to overstate how serious a blow that is to the world's economy. So Iran has demonstrated very clearly that if it wants to hit an area that is 10 meters by 10 meters on an American airbase in Saudi Arabia, they can do that. So if they want to do the same thing on an oil field which cannot fly away, cannot have a hardened shelter build over it, then why couldn't they do that too? This is, I think, totally within Their capability.

David Frum (34:55)

This is the destruction of that, of those surveillance planes that were parked out in the open air in a very arrogant way, it seemed.

Graham Wood (35:00)

Yeah, that's right. And probably the most clear illustration so far of the failure of the United States to prepare for a very predictable threat, which is a drone attack of the sort that Ukraine and Russia has been perfecting for years now. So if they can do that to one of the most valuable air assets the United States has, then they can do it to a piece of refinery equipment that's been sitting out under open skies for years. And those things, again, can take years to replace.

David Frum (35:30)

Did you hear anyone talk when you were in the Gulf about, look, obviously these small, rich states need a protector, but maybe China would be a more predictable and reliable protector than Trump's United States, which seems so erratic and confusing and prone to blundering into wars it doesn't know how to finish.

Graham Wood (35:47)

Yeah. You know, in some way, China already is a protector. And let me explain that. A huge percentage of that oil that exits Saudi Arabia is going to China. So if Iran were to destroy that hydrocarbon infrastructure of the Arab states, then China would be hurt. So if China wants to say, and I would say if I were China, don't do that, don't do anything irreversible to that oil infrastructure, then Iran would probably have to listen because China is one of the few remaining friends that it has. So there's that. Also, though, if you talk to the Saudis, for example, I brought this up when I had an interview with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, and I asked at what point if you feel disrespected by the United States, you turn to the Chinese. And he very openly said, look, there's people in the east who are very happy for us to be disrespected by the United States, and we're ready to turn toward them. Now, there's many other Saudis who maybe in a, less, in a, in, in a moment of less impulse and peak would say, okay, well, that would be complicated to do. Like, it would be to. To turn away from the United States after the long, productive relationship we've had with them would be like turning from 110v to 220 for the entire country where we've set up ourselves completely to work with the Americans. And to, to change that to the Chinese would not be a minor step. It would not be an overnight step. So it wouldn't be that easy to do. But all of those countries have developed strong relationships with China that I think are in a way protecting them already. And of course, they'll probably see ways that it would be useful for them to hedge by developing those connections too.

David Frum (37:39)

Yeah. As I understand the math of the Persian Gulf, it's 20% of the world's oilers. You correctly correct shipborne oil. There's a lot, a lot of oil moves by land and 80% of that oil moves to East Asia. Not just China, but Japan, South Korea, others, but China being the single largest consumer. But there's only one world price, so it's not like the United States can shrug it off and that whatever happens, Americans pay at the pump. Because even if you buy 100% American made fuel, that 100% American made fuel is priced according to whatever the world price is, according to the marginal buyer. Because the Chinese could also buy from American. So long as we have any kind of free market in energy. If the Persian Gulf is closed, then there are more bidders for American oil or for oil from Norway or from other suppliers. So there's one price even though 80% of the Persian Gulf soil flows to East Asia.

Graham Wood (38:27)

Yeah, that's correct. There's one other important fact about Persian Gulf oil and Saudi oil in particular, which is the Saudis have this magical ability to produce more or less oil whenever they wish. This is something that other countries basically don't have. So in that sense, they kind of operate as a sort of fed in the, in the hydrocarbon business. And so to take them offline, to remove that capability means that there's a very important economic lever that no longer is in American hands, Saudi hands, anyone's hands. And having those levers at hands can be, can be, can be awfully important for world markets.

David Frum (39:04)

Well, there are two other sort of more radical thoughts on the energy market that I come away with is watching this. And clearly these are things that can't be done today or tomorrow or they're a decade work. But if you look just at the map, the distance from the Persian Gulf to Haifa in Israel, all the way through Saudi territory is not greater than the pipeline that Saudi Arabia built from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea. They went to the trouble of building a diversionary canal or pipeline that allows them to export via the Red Sea, that is past the Houthis in Yemen, but you could also build a pipeline to Israel and go through the Mediterranean and be surrounded by friendly people the whole, whole way. They didn't do that for political reasons, I assume. And meanwhile, in the past decade, the United States under two Trump administrations with a Not very effective. Biden administration between has made very little progress moving away from petroleum, moving itself and moving the world away from petroleum when we've had a decade of opportunity and technology that enabled us to do that if we reminded to do it.

Graham Wood (40:06)

Yeah, I mean the idea of taking a pipeline all the way to Israel is of course several political steps off. But the integration with Israel was, is, it's pretty obvious that that was one of the end points of Saudi development. You know that whole city in the desert which so far gotten not very far. Neom it's in the upper left corner corner of Saudi Arabia. It only makes sense to build it there if you believe that that particular region is ripe for development. So I think of it as predicated in the long term over some kind of friendly relationship with Israel, maybe including a pipeline. It just hasn't happened yet and the money doesn't seem to be quite there for it. The planning for a post oil economy, of course this is still considered fantasy in that region and, and it's far enough away that I don't blame them for expecting that oil is still going to matter quite a bit in the future.

David Frum (41:03)

The United States has been talking about this for a long time and there are brief intervals but Trump 1, Trump 2 have rejected it and the Biden administration talked about it a lot but didn't do much.

Graham Wood (41:11)

You mean talking about oil dependency shifting

David Frum (41:15)

to fleets of electric vehicles powered by non petroleum sources of fuel in the United States, of course natural gases has huge potential for electrical production and so does nuclear power. If we could ever return to that at any way. You wouldn't. You don't. The days when you need, I mean it's pretty hard to imagine how you power aviation with anything other than petroleum. But the days when you need petroleum to power your motor fleet, those could be behind us.

Graham Wood (41:38)

That would be wonderful. And that would would lower the stakes of the current conflict substantially. So I'm all in favor of that. But as you point out, that was

David Frum (41:47)

a 10 years ago discussion, not a 10 years from now discussion. And we, we just drove past that exit kind of heat needlessly.

Graham Wood (41:53)

I mean the 10 years ago discussion and 20 years ago discussion also involved developing American independence and oil, which did happen and which has eased the stakes of this war for the United States substantially. So it's not as if no planning happened in that direction, but the one that we would of course want the most, which is not relying on oil at all. No, that's, that's still in let's say

David Frum (42:16)

early phases when You've been traveling in this region for a long time. Do you notice in the Middle east region, do you notice any abating of intense anti Western ideology? It seems like the days of Al Qaeda and ISIS are over, but that may be just a misreading from a distance. Do you have any sense that there's actually less purchase in the area for these kinds of anti Western ideology? And if so, what's replacing it?

Graham Wood (42:42)

Yeah, you know, the Gaza war, of course, matters a lot in this discussion. There is a whole new wave of, I don't want to call it radicalization, but hatred of the United States and Israel that has come up in the wake of the Gaza war. But I think the larger secular trend is definitely away from jihadism. And ISIS represented the high point of a kind of call it jihadi, Salafi or Wahhabi version of jihadism, where ISIS was so successful in the period of its greatest prosperity and flourishing that it attracted anyone who had that in mind. They were able to travel there, they were able to die there. And a success that's that acute is followed by a long period of, you know, hard to top that, time to move on to a different thing. And I find that, yeah, there's a lot of people in countries that I previously would have associated with a lot of very harsh anti Americanism, where that seems to be treated as a previous generation's way of being political. So it's definitely waned in that regard. The other component here is Iran, where again, it's been since 2014 when I was last in Iran, and 22,009 when I was last in Tehran. But there, the positive views toward the United States are impossible to ignore as of then. And I think that's still the case where, just as I think you've probably heard many times, you would meet people all the time who don't just say, I would move to the United States if I could, but who say I have positive feelings toward the United States and would like to live in a society like that no matter where I am. So I think that's real and I don't know whether it survives this war.

David Frum (44:33)

Last personal question. Do you tend to return to the region anytime soon? Do you think there'll be things for you to see that you can usefully report?

Graham Wood (44:41)

Yes, I would love to go back as soon as possible. It's a question of where to go. I would like to go to Iran itself. Some journalists are getting in, including from Western outlets. I don't expect that that's going to be. Would be easy do. But this is a regional war. And so I'm thinking pretty hard about where in the region one should go to see the sort of invisible aspects of what's going on. There's places where Iranians have float across the border out of fear of war, and I'd love to talk to them. And Iraq is another place where Iran has had its hooks deep in Iraq for a while now, and there's war happening there too. So finding out what the dynamics there are, it's just a matter of where to go. But I certainly want to go somewhere as soon as possible.

David Frum (45:31)

Graham, thanks so much for talking to me today. Everyone should follow your work in the Atlantic and your two most recent articles on mutually assured energy destruction and snorkeling in the Strait of Hormuz.

Graham Wood (45:40)

Thank you, David.

David Frum (45:41)

Bye bye.

Graham Wood (45:46)

Foreign

David Frum (45:51)

thanks so much to Graham Wood for joining me today on the David Frum Show. As mentioned earlier, my book this week is Common Sense by Thomas Paine. Thomas Paine's Common Sense is one of the remarkable trio of books that were published 250 years ago this year. I've already discussed the first volume of Edward Gibbons, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that was published in February of 1776. The wealth of nations by Adam Smith was published in March of 1776. Now we're going to reach all the way back to January of 1776, when common sense was published as a pamphlet in the United States. At the time, the United States had a population of about 3 million people, not all of them free, not all of them literate, but in that population of some 3 million people, almost half a million copies of Thomas Paine's pamphlet were sold over the coming years. It is maybe the greatest bestseller in the country's history, apart from the Bible, and maybe even in terms of speed of penetration, bigger than the Bible in any given year. It's a book that is worth rereading because it remains to this day accessible and powerful. Thomas Paine was an unusual person to make an impact in the United States. He was actually English born, British born, came to the United States, and he was someone who's in many ways a man of the future. He, he was not a religious man. He was a deist, at most, maybe an outright atheist. He certainly rejected all forms of organized religion at a time when the United States was one of the most religious societies in the world. And he was in many ways a visionary of the future. His later books would outline some kind of image of a of a welfare state when he was writing in the 1790s. But in 1776, he addressed himself directly at the feelings and beliefs of his adopted country. And he made an impact on them unlike anything seen before or maybe since. Common Sense breaks down into a series of sections. It begins with some thoughts on government and society. In this respect, it's one of the first libertarian manifestos. He draws a distinction between government and society and regards society as a positive good, government as a necessary evil. And then for a book that is going to be about declaring American independence from Britain, he begins not with the American British relationship, but but with a general attack on the concept of monarchy. He begins with a case for revolution that would be as binding and applicable in England and the United Kingdom as in the United States. And only after he makes his case against monarchy does he make a case for American independence. So this is a book that is a revolutionary manifesto, not just for Americans, but for people anywhere that the English language is spoken. It also was a book that went maybe farther than many Americans would later wish. Thomas Paine would end up re emigrating from the United States and find himself in a jail in revolutionary France because his thoughts were so at variance with his own society. When his own society after the Revolutionary War ended, tried to put the revolution back in a box. Thomas Paine was not a man to be put in a box. His attack on any unjustifiable form of inequality is one that had enduring implications for a society that found itself after it gained independence. Still, in many ways a society bound by many forms of inequality. Racial most obvious, free versus slave, but others too. It would take the United States a very long time to become the country that Thomas Paine imagined and urged in January 1776. That, I suppose, is why we go on reading this book. We quote it too, but we quote it as so often as the case, often without understanding. It's only a few dozen pages long, I think 48 pages. It's worth rediscovering for yourself and reminding yourself of what a radical proposition it was in 1776 to imagine not just United States free of English rule, many distant countries had broken away from their founding countries, but a society that would become a new kind of society altogether. Society based on both liberty and equality. Ideas, always intentioned, ideas that maybe Thomas Paine did not think through entirely. He was a writer and a polemicist much more than he was a philosopher. But he put these concepts in motion in ways that speak to us still and that are worth rediscovering on this 250th anniversary of the publication of Common Sense by Thomas Paine. Thank you so much for joining me today on the David Frum Show. Thanks to all, all who watch and listen to this program. As always, if you are minded to support the work of this program, the best way to do it is by supporting and subscribing to the Atlantic, where both Graham Wood and I work and where we are both grateful for your readership. I look forward to speaking to you next week here on the David Frum Show. Bye. Bye. This episode of the David Frum show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdes. It was engineered by Dave Grine. Our theme is by Andrew Edwards. Claudine Abayad is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Baldez is our managing editor.