John Podhoretz (49:09)
But I want to talk about the orneriness of Trump in relation to that, because he told Liz Landers of PBS NewsHour in a phone conversation, I think Monday night, he said, this is how she phrased it. In her tweet, Trump said, the conflict is, quote, a very small price to pay, unquote, after years of terror from the regime and, quote, the oil prices will drop like a rock as soon as it's over. When I asked for a timeline on those dropping, he said, well, as soon as the war is over, I don't believe that it will be long. And then she asked whether he saw troops on the ground in Iran and whether that might happen. I don't want to say that, he said. When I asked if his thinking has changed on that issue, he said, no, it's not changed, but just didn't want to discuss strategy with a reporter. This is important because yesterday in a press conference before the Kennedy center, before he started talking about the white paint that you use on steel that they're going to use at the Kennedy center, he said, I'm sorry, I lost my train of thought because I decided to make a joke about the paint, so you should really not do that. But yesterday, so he says it's small parts of paint. Yesterday, he said, look, the Straits of Hormuz are not even a problem for us. We import 1% of America's oil comes as a result of transshipment through the Straits of Hormuz. That's why he thinks it is meet and proper for Japan and China and Great Britain and France and Germany and other countries to come in with him to, to escort ships if necessary, to keep the strait open, because we Americans are energy independent and they're not. Now, oil is a fungible substance. The price of oil is a world market question. So, you know, it matters. What if you shut the Straits of Hormuz down? Because then on the open market, a barrel of oil that we buy for $60 a barrel will still cost us $120 a barrel if the oil supply shrinks in terms of futures. Like, we aren't isolated from world oil prices. In fact, American companies would benefit from a sharp reduction in the amount of oil being produced if they're American energy oil producers. So you actually have weird parts of the economy that would gain from this. But I think it's striking that he's saying, I'm going on as long as I want to because whatever price that people are going to pay should be paid because we got to get this regime out of there. And as long as he is ornery, this is my feeling. As long as he doesn't say, I gotta get the hell out of this. Because the oil prices are going too high. He seems to have crossed some Rubicon in his head, in my sense, in the last week, where he's like, we're just gonna finish this. And so, you know, I'm not. And he's weirdly calmer. I said this yesterday, it seems to me. So he's already decided. They're gonna say he didn't do it. They're gonna say he didn't succeed. They cannot play a role in how they can't get into his head. And if you want this mission to succeed, you have to not have a date certain on it, like March 31, which is what Israelis were telling Jonathan last week. You have to have no date certain where he's got to get out, nor some kind of mythical target oil price beyond which the world cannot go to make him pull back. And therefore, what it means for the war to end now comes down to whether he thinks that he has secured the aim of not only ending the regime's ability to project power, but that he has created the conditions, or he and the Israelis have created the conditions which are not going to happen while the war is on, which is what's important for the regime to collapse. And that's why the Israelis are going and going to local besieged headquarters and things like that. They are doing whatever they can to send the message to the Iranian people that they are eliminating the people in Iran who will. Who would kill them if they decided to try to take their country back?
