But there are also a lot more trivial consequences. The world's biggest condom makers are raising the price of condoms. This is not trivial.
No, no.
I'm Michelle Cottle. I cover national politics for New York Times Opinion. And I am here today with the fabulous columnist David French and the equally fabulous Times Opinion science writer David Wallace-Wells, who writes a lot about climate change, technology, and generally the future of the planet. Guys, welcome. How's everybody?
Michelle, great to see you. Good to be here.
All right. So it's going to be complicated because I've got two Davids today. So you're just going to have to pay attention. Bear with me. Today we're going to talk about the state of war in Iran, the price of oil. And David Wallace-Wells even has a silver lining for us. So we got a lot to cover. Let's get to it. Trump recently referred to the Iran war as a skirmish, which sounds to me a little bit like something that happens at a soccer match. But also this week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared that Operation Epic Fury has concluded. So, David French, what word would you use to talk about the war right now? Where do things stand, with the usual caveat that we are taping this on a Thursday morning.
So I'm going to cheat and go with two words: confusing mess. I don't think that really anybody can definitively say right now who's maybe even in the government that can say what is the status of the negotiations. What are the true sticking points on the deal? What are the actual red lines that the parties have? On any given day, we often don't even know if there's any shooting going on. There's just an enormous amount of confusion. And at the end of the day, I don't know. I don't think anybody really knows where we're going to end up. I mean, I've heard everything from what we're going to reach an agreement on reopening the Strait of Hormuz, which just restores the status quo ante bellum, but we're going to table everything else for now. Which then leads us into this question of what did we really, truly accomplish of lasting value of the multiple items that the administration has put forward: ending the nuclear program, ending support for proxies, destroying the missile capacity, sinking the navy, etc. They seem to have accomplished one of those things, sinking the navy, but everything else has not been accomplished. So that's all I can think to say: confusing mess as of today.
David Wallace-Wells, you?
I mean, one lasting impact that we do seem to have achieved is to have put much of the global economy in a kind of a chokehold. Now, that wasn't the intent at the outset, but I think that might be as lasting an impact as anything that was undertaken by the military directly. And we're a little bit short of seeing the ultimate impacts of that around the world and in the U.S. Most analysts and experts think that the effects of the closure of the strait have yet to really hit Americans in particular, but to some lesser extent, Europe and other parts of the world. And so it may well be that we haven't even really seen the main story of this war quite yet, and that the economic impacts that do arrive over the next month or several months may loom a lot larger than the hot war that we fought a few weeks ago.
O.K., David Wallace-Wells, I want you to dig into that because you recently wrote that this is not going to be a forever war like earlier wars in the Middle East. It's going to be an everything war. So let's just go hard on that. Tell me what this means.
Well, I think at the outset of the war, someone who is a skeptic would have said that the worst-case scenario was something like the conflicts that we got involved in in Iraq and Afghanistan. That's something that we thought was going to be a relatively easy campaign in which American forces just overwhelmed the other side. But then we got tangled up into the political complications of a real mess around the world. That was the worst-case scenario, and that hasn't happened. I don't think it's going to happen, but something else happened, which is that Iran very quickly demonstrated its ability to close the Strait of Hormuz. And the result of that is really quite large and significant. I also think it's kind of profound in the sense that we spent much of the last decade telling ourselves that the era of globalization was over. Covid was supposedly pushing us towards more supply chain resilience. And here we find ourselves as a planet, as a global economy, held hostage by one particular conflict in one particular part of the world. And I don't think that anyone in the Trump administration adequately game-planned for that, which is a huge indictment of them. But I also think they're still acting as though many of those impacts aren't quite real, because when they look on their Bloomberg terminal, the price of oil is up but not up that dramatically. The effect on the stock market on some days is visible and some days it's not visible. And they really do think that those secondary indicators represent the ultimate economic impact of the war, rather than the on-the-ground effects that we've already seen in Asia and Southeast Asia and are going to, I think, increasingly be seeing in Europe and the Americas.
So because I like to have very specific things to panic about, want to just give me some of the lagging downstream things that I should be freaking out about.
The thing that's most distressing, I think, is the fertilizer stuff. I mean, I just saw some recent survey that said that basically [X] percent of American farmers say that they can't afford fertilizer this planting season. Now, I tend to think that surveys like that usually overstate the panic. But then elsewhere in the world where farmers don't have nearly the buffer capacity that American farmers do, say across Africa, there's going to be real huge consequences to price spikes for fertilizer and the effects of this war. The downstream effects of this war are really quite grim. We could be talking about tens of millions of additional people suffering extreme hunger, or being forced into or close to famine as a result of this fertilizer consequence, which, again, isn't even like on the Trump administration's radar, as far as I can tell. But there are also a lot more trivial consequences. The world's biggest condom makers are raising the price of condoms. This is not trivial.
Well, I mean, in a certain way, it isn't trivial. Like the condom maker that most famously raised the price is also one that donates a huge amount of condoms for the prevention of STDs in the developing world. So there may be genuine public health catastrophes that come out of this. There's almost no product that you look at and think, this is completely unaffected by the supply of any of the things that are tied up in the Strait of Hormuz. And that means that to some degree, everything is going to get at least more expensive and maybe somewhat short of supply. Exactly how we manage that is an open question, but the experts are really ringing the alarm and telling us that quite a lot of stuff is going to be quite bad. And at the very least, we know that the Gulf countries are almost all of them, maybe all of them, going to be experiencing a recession this year as a result of this war. So Donald Trump launched a war of choice, basically, in my view, unprompted by or unprovoked by an adversary, and with very little understanding or appreciation for the fact that war is messy, and this war in this place against this adversary would get especially messy.
David French, did you want to throw in with that?
Yeah, a couple of things here. It's really important to note that we are plunging, potentially plunging part of the world, if not much of the world over time, into recession on a war of our choice that we did not consult with our allies on. And what's compounding it is we did this to them. And right now cannot turn around and look at those same allies and say, well, we ultimately you'll thank us or ultimately we did a favor. It would be one situation if the global economy was kind of cracking and there were strains, and you had a new regime in Iran, or total assurance that there was no nuclear program or absolute assurance that Iran was not going to be regionally destabilizing the Middle East anymore. But we've got the instability from the war, but without the victory in the war. And if you'll notice that the language from the administration is really narrowing, they're really narrowing down to the nuclear program. It's nuclear, nuclear, nuclear. Well, rhetorically, that's a very clever strategy on two fronts. One, nobody wants a nuclear Iran. But then, number two, it's nuclear. Iran has been the Lucy with the football for year after year after year after year. We've heard the same thing. Iran is two weeks away. Iran is three months away. Iran is four months away. Nobody knows what's true about Iran and the nuclear program. Because remember, we were just told a little bit ago that same nuclear program had been obliterated. And there's one last thing on this, I would say, and I am somebody who I've long been a hawk on Iran. Like, if you brought the right case to me with the right plan, the right exit strategy, and I was a senator, there are definitely circumstances I would have voted yes. But you can want something done to Iran and realize that this team, this leadership, is not up to it. That you can take something that's a defensible idea in the abstract, with the right plans, the right leadership, etc., and you put the wrong plans and the wrong leadership and you've just rendered it a disaster. Just a total disaster.
Thank you. Because I think we've talked about this a little bit before. I was of that mind way back during the Iraq war, when the Bush administration did not seem to be making the best possible case for it. And who's doing the work matters. It's not just whether the philosophical concept or—
Exactly. The argument is great. Who's actually going to execute is a huge chunk of the game. Come on. I mean, imagine a war where—imagine a battle where there is an attack on a flank that is necessary and you're a subordinate, you're proposing it to your commander, and you say, we need to attack the right flank. O.K., who's going to lead the charge? May I introduce you to Bozo the Clown? No, no, no, no, not that plan. We're not doing that. Who's executing matters. It really matters.
David French, I think a little bit less of a hawk on this than you guys are. But I would say that the position that you're describing has also—we've learned something through this war about what was possible six months ago or a year ago or three years ago about Iran. And that is to say, Iran has proven itself a much more capable adversary than almost anyone in the military community understood or was properly planning for. And that is not just about Iran itself. I think we're learning something very fundamental about the changing nature of contemporary warfare, which we probably should have learned watching Russia and Ukraine. And with the failed American campaign against the Houthis last year, where in a very similar situation, we went in with billion-dollar military offensive and actually kind of got our butts handed to us by a bunch of people flying low-cost drones into our incredibly high-priced military material. And I think what we're learning from all of these encounters is that the superiority which Americans used to assume gave them the power, if not to inflict military damage on almost any country around the world, is not nearly as large. Our superiority is not nearly as clear in many of these conflicts as we assumed. I think the result of that, or what should be the result of that, is that we understand that there's a shrinking superpower advantage around the world, that almost any country with a relatively capable industrial base can resist attacks from a major force like America. And in this context, what that means is that whatever the state of the Iranian nuclear weapon, they actually had what the former Russian president called the Hormuz weapon, or the equivalent—a nuclear arsenal in the Strait of Hormuz, because they're able to fly low-cost drones, which cost hundreds of millions, with hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of oil on them. Or as we're learning more and more, against American airplanes, American bases. Over the last week, we've seen a bunch of news stories coming out about how much more damage the American military has suffered in this conflict than we were told. It's kind of shocking, but we're learning that this fight was not a dominant military performance. And I think what that tells us is that even six months ago, even three months ago, if this plan had been implemented by much more thoughtful, careful planners, we may still have run into the same trouble that we ran into this time. I don't think the planet—I don't think our geopolitics has really reckoned with just how destabilizing that might be. To think that many more countries are capable of mounting much more successful counteroffensives against the countries that they used to be quite intimidated by.
Well, I have—looking at just the Hormuz situation, I get the feeling that maybe even Iran was surprised by how effective this was as a weapon. And I'm wondering, the rest of the world, the idea of shutting down sea lanes in a global economy seems like something that you don't want people to just start doing as a matter of course. And I'm very nervous about what lesson we've taught them about how effective this can be.
Just to emphasize that we went through in the three or four weeks or however long of intensive combat operations, I don't think Americans realize the extent that we were subject to Baghdad Bobbery from our own government. And if you remember the Iraq war, 2003, Baghdad Bob. He was the spokesperson for the Hussein government. Everything's going great. We are destroying tanks, pursuing them, killing them, and we will continue. And he's saying, Americans are nowhere near us, etc. They are not even hundreds of miles or whatever. They are not in any place. We're not used to having a Baghdad Bob administration. It's not that our governments have always been truthful towards us. They have lied. But the comprehensive dishonesty—and this war began with an avalanche of comprehensive dishonesty, essentially calling this a giant rout. Why is the media not reporting more on the incredible success of American arms? When the media was reporting on Americans hitting targets, what we are not reporting on—what was being withheld from us and is still being withheld from us, it's having to leak out, as David was saying, in other ways—serious damage has been done to American facilities, and this is a new thing. When I was in Iraq, we did worry an awful lot about rocket fire and mortar fire, say, into our bases. We didn't worry about a comprehensive drone threat that could level our buildings. And here's another thing to keep in mind. Russia is looking at this and looking at Iran's drone technology and saying, that's Romper Room, that's kindergarten compared to what we have right now. Russia and Ukraine are, I would say, are by far the two most advanced and evolved land armies in the world, to the point where I think if any other land army—and I'm putting an emphasis on that because Russia can't match us in the air, can't match us at sea—but if any other land army that has not been engaged in this kind of drone warfare were to take on Ukraine or Russia right now, it would be horrific what would happen. And so we've got these two adversaries, and we had to call to Ukraine to help the Gulf countries, had to call to Ukraine to help. And Russia is looking at it and saying, need Ukraine's help to face Iran. Imagine if you faced us. And look, I'm not again—I'm not saying that Russia can match us in Air Force or Navy, but it's pretty clear that we're not ready. And we've demonstrated that we're not ready for this new warfare.
And you're talking about Russia. But when I speak to military analysts, they say this has really spooked us about China. A lot of brainpower has been spent over the last half decade, decade kind of wargaming and planning for possible conflict over Taiwan. And they say, how could we possibly pretend to be capable of defending Taiwan when we can't even protect our ships from Iranian drones? The Chinese are much, much more capable than Iran is. And we'd be exposed in a much more obvious way through any kind of military support we were giving to Taiwan. Now, I don't know how long this dynamic will last. I expect that the American military is learning these lessons, these hard lessons, pretty quickly, and that we will be doing a lot more in low-cost—they call it attritable drone technology, having weapons that we're comfortable losing as opposed to needing to fly home because they cost tens of millions of dollars or more. But that's still probably a few years away. And in the meantime, I think we're in a situation where not just the United States, but all of the world's superpowers are looking around thinking, the landscape of warfare really has changed. Some new land has been broken in the Ukraine conflict, and we're all just playing catch up.
And then you have this first—this war between Russia and Ukraine, the first war in this very modern era between two advanced countries. And what is one of the first things you learn? You just need a whole bunch of stuff—a lot of artillery shells, a lot of drones, a lot of missiles. And I would question honestly if China is looking at what's happening, if they're asking themselves, do we have enough stuff? And I think what you're going to be seeing is a lot of powers in the world putting their foot on the gas. You're already seeing it—one of the largest peacetime expansions in military spending that we've seen since before, say, proportionately since, say, before World War II. And I'm just wondering, Michelle and David, as all these world powers are pressing the gas militarily, as we've had aggressive warfare in Ukraine, as we've seen this war in Iran, who's tapping the brakes? Is anyone tapping the brakes not named Pope Leo? Is anyone tapping the brakes here? And that's what really alarms me is we're in an arms race around the world. We have very aggressive—each one of the three, if you're going to say there's three powers that stand above the rest—Russia, China, United States—each one of them is led by a pretty aggressive, bellicose individual. So far, the most peaceful seems to be Xi from China at the moment. He hasn't attacked anybody, but there's unquestionably he has his goals, he has his ambitions. And this worries me in an August of 1914 sense. I'm not saying we're headed in that direction, but one of the dynamics that we had leading up to World War I was all of these great powers that were pressing the gas, and nobody was pressing the brakes. And that's what it—that's what the geopolitical situation seems like today.
