Here is a transcript of my interview for Background Briefing with Ian Masters on KPFK in Los Angeles. The transcript is computer-generated. I asked Claude to clean it up but caveat emptor.

IAN MASTERS: Background Briefing, available 24/7 at backgroundbriefing.org. Joining us now is Juan Cole, Professor of Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. He is also the author of the blog Informed Comment at juancole.com, and the author of The Ayatollahs and Democracy in Iraq, Engaging the Muslim World, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires, and most recently, Gaza Yet Stands. He has an article at TomDispatch, “The Electric Car Won the Iran War: The Twilight of Oil.” Welcome to Background Briefing, Juan Cole.

JUAN COLE: Thank you, Ian.

IAN MASTERS: So, Juan, in your article at TomDispatch, you make the case that Israel and the United States have destabilized the Persian Gulf and global oil and natural gas supplies for the foreseeable future. Now, as far as I know, what happened was that Netanyahu talked Trump into this war and told him it would be over in a couple of days. Trump, in turn, told the Gulf nations and Saudi Arabia that it would be over in 100 hours. He told Prime Minister Starmer that it would be over in three days. So what are we dealing with here? Stupidity or unbelievable cynicism?

JUAN COLE: I think mainly stupidity. Donald Trump is a very erratic person, and he does a lot of rash things. I think he got it in his head that this would be like Venezuela — it would be a cakewalk. Why wouldn’t he do it? It is also the case that he has big donors who wanted him to do this, and he has to now think about his post-presidential life.

I think he wants to make those donors happy. I don’t think we should discount the pressure of the oil companies on him. We know that pro-Netanyahu donors like Miriam Adelson gave him a ton of money. So probably there’s some political calculation involved, but I also think that he simply didn’t know what Iran is, or its geographic and political relationship to the Gulf.

IAN MASTERS: The winners of this war — and of course we’re going to talk about electric cars — but at this moment, Saudi Aramco just posted their biggest quarterly profits in history. American oil companies are making out like bandits. Russia has been given the gift of sanctions taken off their oil. And Trump, of course, has some peculiar love affair with Putin. It’s very mysterious and perhaps treasonous. So, if you look at it from that point of view, his oil company backers are making out, and his buddy Putin is making out. So is that just collateral, or is that intentional?

JUAN COLE: If Trump genuinely thought the war would be short, then the energy spike and the upward trend in oil prices would have been short-lived. So I don’t think that can be what is driving him. As it turns out, I think he and Netanyahu have permanently destabilized the Persian Gulf region as a source of global energy. I fear most Americans — your readership and listenership — may not fully appreciate how bad this crisis is. This is a fifth of the world’s petroleum supplies, and a fifth of its liquefied natural gas, just blocked off. It’s not coming out. There’s been nearly a billion barrels of petroleum that have been lost.

That hasn’t shown up as big a crisis for the American consumer yet as it might have. It’s complicated. The Persian Gulf petroleum has certain specifications that make refining it a specialized endeavor, and it’s Asia — China and others — who have the refineries for that Gulf petroleum. But once it’s refined, it goes into a world market. People in the industry talk about us all being in one big bathtub. So when the water level goes down for anybody, it goes down for everybody. And that’s what’s going to happen. Gradually this summer, as oil reserves are tapped out, it’s going to take a while to get this oil back online, even if there is some kind of temporary political settlement. We’re going to see the world’s worst energy crisis in history this coming year.

IAN MASTERS: It could, of course, get worse if, out of frustration — with the Iranians holding all the cards and Trump being desperate — he takes the military option. We know that is hazardous, because recent intelligence reports indicate that Iran basically still has most of its missiles, and a conflict could last three or four months. So if he does strike back and use the military option, it would be even worse than what you just described.

JUAN COLE: It would be worse in the sense that at the moment, only about a third of the Gulf’s refinery capacity has been damaged or destroyed, and so much of the oil could go back on the market fairly quickly over a few months. The price of petroleum is still going to likely be over $100 a barrel for the rest of this year, if not much worse. But if, as you say, Trump were to attack Iran again — and were he to, for instance, attack Iran’s oil facilities, making it impossible for Iran to earn future revenues on its petroleum for the very long term — Iran has already announced and demonstrated that it can inflict similar damage on the other oil producers in the Gulf: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait. In fact, no oil has come from Kuwait onto the world market for a month, which is the first time that has happened since the Gulf War in 1991.

So if Iran took revenge on an attack on its energy resources by taking out its neighbors, that would take something on the order of 20 million barrels a day off the market, virtually permanently. The world pumps about 100 million barrels a day. In a market where you take 20 million barrels off — that’s a fifth, that’s 20% — prices would not simply go up 20%. Because oil is inelastic, both in its demand and its production, relatively speaking, prices would skyrocket. And they already are for much of the world. In Europe, people are paying the equivalent of $10 a gallon in some countries. In Asia, it’s already to the point where there are no barrels — gas stations are closing because they can’t get petroleum. And that’s coming for the United States.

IAN MASTERS: Let’s talk about your article at TomDispatch, “The Electric Car Won the Iran War: The Twilight of Oil.” Obviously our government, if it’s a kakistocracy — a cabal of dunces — you’ve got the Secretary of Transportation in the last six months making a reality TV show with him and his nine children. Gas prices are spiking, and you’ve got Trump, who — I don’t know whether he’s 100% working for the oil companies or he honestly believes the insanity he’s imposed on us by talking about clean coal and his hatred of wind energy, windmills, solar, and electric cars. And he’s just turned the clock back. You’ve got members of Congress like Debbie Dingell and a Republican colleague putting bills before the House to prevent the United States from importing cheap Chinese electric cars. And Trump has given the people who run the big three companies here in the United States — Stellantis, or whatever it’s called now, along with Ford and GM — no incentive to move to electric vehicles. Even though they started to do so, Trump has given them permission to reverse that. Why they decided to go back to big gas-guzzling SUVs and pickup trucks I don’t know, but that’s what’s happening.

So this is an amazing situation, isn’t it? Your article points out that this Chinese company, Contemporary Amperex Technology, or CATL, a giant battery manufacturer in China, has just announced that they’ve developed a new battery that will enable an electric vehicle to travel 932 miles on a single charge, and the recharge only takes 6½ minutes — about the same time it takes to fill up your tank at a gas station. So here’s the contrast: we’re moving backwards to the Stone Age, or the Jurassic Age, or whatever, and the rest of the world, led by China, is moving into the clean energy future.

JUAN COLE: Yes, Trump has had us abdicate our industrial and technological lead in the world. The auto industry was a big engine of American success in the 20th century, and it is in danger, as you say, of failing. These companies could be killed by the Chinese auto manufacturers, who are very good. BYD is now a bigger company than Tesla, and they make a clean energy car. You travel in places like Mexico or Europe and you see them everywhere — and they’re being kept out of the United States by 100% tariffs. But the fact is, these American companies — Stellantis, Ford, and GM — only a minority of their showrooms are in the United States. They have to compete globally. And if they insist on remaining tied to gasoline, they will fail. People are giving up on gasoline, and one of my points in this article at TomDispatch and in The Nation is that you can never again depend on reliable petroleum coming out of the Gulf. Because this war is not going to be over anytime soon. They failed — they did not degrade Iran’s capabilities the way they wanted to, and they will try again. So there’s going to be another energy spike, and this one could be, as you suggested, even more damaging.

So why would you tie your national future in transportation — if you were any country in the world — to Gulf petroleum? You wouldn’t. South Korea is in a big bind. It has managed to scramble and find non-Hormuz sources, and has about three months of gasoline. After that, nothing, if this crisis goes on. The South Koreans are going to have to walk. In Bangladesh, the Philippines, and lots of Asian countries, the timeline is shorter than that. I think the Philippines has a month.

So what you would be doing, if you were a national government anywhere in the world, is putting in electric chargers and incentives for consumers to move to electric transportation. And that means buying from China. It doesn’t mean buying from Ford or GM — although, to be fair, GM is the best of them, because it does have good electric vehicles — but it’s going to be very difficult for America to compete. If America loses its automotive industrial base, we could end up a third world country, a service economy. And that’s where Trump is taking us — to a world where China is the superpower, economically and in every other way.

IAN MASTERS:He’s out there now with a weak hand, and he gets rolled by every foreign leader. Putin rolls him. Even lowlifes like Erdoğan roll him. .I don’t expect anything from this trip, but he’s got Musk and the Boeing CEO with him, and he may get a deal out of it. But as you point out, BYD is just eclipsing Tesla.

Trump is obviously going to lean on Xi and try to have Xi lean on the Iranians to get Trump out of this mess. I don’t know whether Xi can do that, and if he could, what is Xi asking from Trump? I mean, Trump is ready to give away the store. That’s what he does in international negotiations.

JUAN COLE: Yeah, his bright idea seems to be inviting Chinese companies to come and set up manufacturing facilities in the United States. If BYD did that, then Detroit is done with altogether. I don’t know what the details will be, but he’s talking about 100 Chinese companies establishing manufacturing facilities in the United States. What are we, the third world?

With regard to the Gulf crisis, and Iran, and so forth — since Trump lost, and he lost badly, the only thing he can do to save face now is declare a victory and go home. He can say, “We hit them 13,000 times.” A lot of those 13,000 hits were on decoys and were useless. But he can quote those statistics that Hegseth likes to trot out — “destroyed their Navy and their Air Force,” as if they had one — and go home. Just leave the Gulf alone and let Saudi Arabia and Iran work it out amongst themselves. That’s the only thing he can do. And so far he’s been unwilling to do it.

IAN MASTERS: He’s set these benchmarks, like “they can’t have a nuclear weapon,” when in effect they already do. My problem, Juan, is that we have a complete idiot in the White House who’s losing his marbles — and he never had many to begin with. Look what happened the last time he was around, in his first term. COVID was the one challenge he had, and a million people died unnecessarily because this fool’s idea was that you drink bleach and shine a UV light inside your body. That’s what we’re dealing with. A reckless ignoramus. And I, for the life of me, do not understand why people haven’t figured out who this guy is, and most of all, why the press treat him as a normal person. When he clearly isn’t. He’s not a normal president. He’s a walking, bloated catastrophe.

JUAN COLE: There are two things I’d say in response to your good comments. One is, Iran has never had a militarized nuclear weapons program. It had a civilian enrichment program, and the CIA and other intelligence agencies in the United States have never assessed that it had decided to militarize. Given what has happened, it may well be that a new generation of hardliners in Iran decides they just have to have a nuclear weapon to defend themselves — because what happened to Iran didn’t happen to North Korea. Trump may have pushed them off the fence. I think they had wanted to announce to the world that they had the potential to make a nuclear weapon if they got pushed too hard, but they didn’t actually want to make one, because there would be UN sanctions. You see the kind of sanctions that are on North Korea.

But now they’ve killed the clerical leader of Iran, who was the one who kept issuing juridical pronouncements against nuclear weapons. It could well be that Trump has set Iran on a sprint toward a nuclear weapon. But as you suggest, there’s nothing he can do about it if they decide to do that.


Persian Gulf. Satellite photo. Public Domain. Via Picryl

As for the question of how Trump is treated in the press — and you’re in the business, so you know — the United States has become an incredible plutocracy. Our media is controlled by very far-right individuals who have no morals. Look at what Jeff Bezos of Amazon has done to the Washington Post. Look at what Elon Musk has done to Twitter. And now look at what Larry Ellison, David Ellison, and Bari Weiss are doing to CBS. Your ordinary, everyday American consumer of news — people in Peoria, Illinois, which used to be the standard for common sense — are now being fed, on a daily and hourly basis, a load of bullcrap about Trump. And it’s quite deliberate. They wanted Trump there because they knew he would do what they wanted, which was to slash the parts of the government that benefit people, so as to convince people they don’t need a government. They’re libertarians. They don’t want to pay taxes. They don’t want a government. They knew Trump would do that for them — kick people off SNAP, stop trying to take care of people, gut the universities and health care.

What they really want is El Salvador. They want to be strong men in a third world country where everybody else is a peasant. That’s what they’re trying to turn the United States into. They know that Trump is a useful idiot who would do what they told him to do.

IAN MASTERS: Thank you very much for joining us here today, in what used to be the United States of America.

JUAN COLE: Thank you, Ian. All the best.

IAN MASTERS: I’ve been speaking with Juan Cole, Professor of Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan, author of the blog Informed Comment at juancole.com, and author of Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires and most recently Gaza Yet Stands. He has an article in The Nation, “This Is Why the Hormuz Crisis Is Different from Other Oil Crises,” and [the same piece is] at TomDispatch [under the title] “The Electric Car Won the Iran War: The Twilight of Oil.”