The Iran War Cease-Fire and the Return of the Energy Weapon

0:00Lots of places can expose you to identity theft. Oh, no. That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats to your identity, which is way more than anyone can do on their own. If we find anything suspicious, like new loans or changes to your financial accounts, we alert you right away, all through text, phone, email, or the LifeLock app. Get the alerts that could make all the difference. Save up to 30% your first year at lifelock.com slash podcast. Terms apply.

0:30Hi, I'm Ravi Agrawal, Foreign Policy's Editor-in-Chief. This is FP Live.

0:40So I'm recording this episode on the morning of Wednesday, the 8th of April. On Tuesday evening, Iran and the United States announced a two-week ceasefire that was brokered by Pakistan. Already this morning, the ceasefire feels tenuous. But it's better than the alternative, which was a threat by U.S. President Donald Trump to wipe out Iran's civilization. We'll see where the coming days take us. My featured interview this week is about how Iran has used energy as a weapon over these past five weeks.

1:15Initially, an attack on Iran was framed as being about security. Israel's security, Israel's security, the region's security, even the world's security, especially if Iran got a nuclear bomb. But Iran's closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and now its de facto control of it, made the narrative about energy. Why is energy being used as a weapon of war? I have a terrific guest who has long been making the case that none of this should be a surprise.

1:46That's coming up. But first, I thought I'd share my read on things the morning after we learned about a ceasefire. As I said, it's shaky. It's tenuous. I'm hopeful, but I'm not bullish. And we still have so many questions. What was actually achieved? As I've argued before in FP and on this show, the facts don't look great for Trump. The Iranian regime is degraded but intact. Iran can still launch ballistic missiles and attack drones.

2:17And it's still in possession of 440 kilograms of highly enriched uranium. If the war's objectives were to prevent Iran from being in this position, then those objectives have failed. On top of that, Iran now seems to have de facto control of the Strait of Hormuz, the world's most consequential choke point for energy. With such a strong weapon of war, it may no longer even need to pursue a nuclear weapon. Each side is going to spin this ceasefire as a win.

2:50We should expect that. But as I've written in a new FP piece today, what's lingering in my mind is how the expert community predicted that Iran could turn into a quagmire. And in that sense, this is the opposite of the Iraq war. When Iran shut the Strait of Hormuz, Trump said, who knew they'd do that? Well, his own director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, told a Senate hearing that that was exactly the assessment of the entire intelligence community.

3:21Trump said nobody expected Iran to attack the Gulf states if it were provoked. Wrong again. Multiple former policymakers have told me this is exactly what was expected in war games. Experts sometimes get it wrong. You still need them in the room. You still need to empower them to speak up. And instead, as we know, Trump has long privileged loyalty over frankness. He's fired countless experts and career diplomats from the White House and the State Department.

3:53If you think about it, stumbling into an ill-conceived war shouldn't actually be a surprise. Perhaps Trump had a false sense of security from how the Venezuela operation worked out and how he was able to spin success in the media after that, and also after the 12-day war in Iran last June. But as the New York Times shows in a stunning piece of reporting this week, Trump's own cabinet members told him that he shouldn't believe Israel's claims about how easy it would be to win a war in Iran.

4:24The CIA's director said the idea of regime change was farcical. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called it bullshit. It's all in the reporting, and the leaks have begun. But it's clear that Trump just followed his gut on this one, and not the experts. I think that's an important finding to mull on this week. Because if the ceasefire is to hold, and if other U.S. adversaries aren't to take advantage of Trump, he will need to at least start empowering U.S. experts to speak up.

5:00For more, I've left a link to my essay on this, as well as the Times report I mentioned in the show notes.

5:07Okay, on to this week's interview, which we taped one day before the announcement of the ceasefire, but it holds up nicely. The world seems to have been lulled into a false sense of security, that more and more energy would be produced, and supply disruptions would be a thing of the past. But war is back. And energy is fair game in war, as the world has relearned after Iran held the Strait of Hormuz hostage. So how should countries really think about energy security?

5:38How does the clean energy transition play into this? Megan O'Sullivan has been thinking about these questions for many years. She's a professor of international affairs at Harvard University and runs the Belfer Center there. As you'll see in this conversation, she wears many relevant hats. She's an expert on the Middle East, drawing on her service in the Bush administration. She has direct experience on peace negotiations with her work on continuing issues in Northern Ireland. And she's an energy expert,

6:09as we know from her terrific book, Windfall, how the new energy abundance upends global politics and strengthens America's power. We'll have another episode this week on Iran again. But for now, let's dive in.

6:27So we're going to talk a fair bit about energy today. Our audience is familiar with the numbers. Oil prices have jumped some 80% year to date. Jet fuel has doubled. There are blackouts in Asia, fuel rationing in Europe and elsewhere. And all of this, as we've been saying, is because the Strait of Hormuz is responsible for carrying a fifth of all global crude and also of natural gas. Megan, how does this current moment compare to previous energy shocks? Well, it's interesting that you asked that question.

6:57The obvious energy shock that we compare it to are the shocks of the 1970s. 1973, the oil embargo, where Arab members of OPEC declined to export their oil to the United States and other supporters of Israel in the 1973 war. But they also started to take oil off the market, the absolute amount of oil that was on the market. And then there was the oil shock after the Iranian revolution later that decade. So percentage-wise and the physical number of barrels that were taken off the market in 1973

7:32is considerably less than is happening today. As you and your listeners will have heard over and over again, this is the biggest supply disruption that we've ever seen. So we're talking about 10 million barrels of oil a day that essentially are not on the market, that would be on the market normally, and about 20% of the world's liquefied natural gas capacity. However, the market has not responded. The prices have gone up considerably, as you noted,

8:04but you might think that the price would double or triple or quadruple as it did in the 1970s. And there are a number of reasons for that. I'd say the biggest reason, and I expect this to change in the coming week or two, up until now, the market has really not priced in the geopolitical risk that we're facing. It has been very attentive to President Trump's claims that were almost done, that it's nearing an end, that the mission is largely accomplished. And so the idea that this kind of, and this level of disruption could go on

8:36for more weeks or even months has not really been internalized by the market. But there are other good reasons too, and we can talk about it more, so I'll just say a couple of sentences about it. But the reaction to 1973 was a whole set of reforms that individual countries made to their own energy system to make them less oil intensive, but also to the architecture of the global energy system, that we moved into decades-long endeavors to make the oil market and then later the liquefied natural gas market

9:11more integrated, more global, more resilient to shocks. And in many ways, this has helped us manage this shock, even though to many people filling up their gas tank, they may not feel like it's been managed. But, you know, the fact that there exists a mechanism, a global mechanism to release strategic supplies into the global market has been very helpful here. We've seen the largest release, the existence of these supplies, which started, again, after the 1973 oil shock.

9:42So we have more tools, we have more experience, and that has been helpful, although, you know, fundamentally won't prevent the prices from going much higher. They're just kind of mechanisms to manage the moment. But if the moment turns into an era, then we're going to see it in our markets. I was just going to say something exactly like that, Megan, because the longer this goes on, the sort of fiscal costs mount. And it's worth noting that one of the big differences between the 70s and now

10:12is that for most countries, average deficits are more than twice what they were then, and so countries just have less fiscal room to subsidize fuel or deal with inflation. Yeah, and this is some kind of combination of what we saw during COVID and then the energy shock we saw after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Not as severe, nearly, now. I would say a fraction of what we saw in both of those shocks to the system, but with a very clear potential for getting much more significant.

10:45Hmm. So I want to get at the question that I posed at the start and that you've written about with Jason Bordoff, who was on the show with us last month. The idea of energy as a weapon, as a cudgel of foreign policy for countries to use. First, why did it go away as a weapon in recent decades? Why is it back? Well, I would say it never went away. It just kind of receded to the background. And part of it allows me to pick up where I left off with the 1970s

11:18and the reaction of the world to becoming more integrated, to building up the global market in a way that oil became the most easily traded commodity in the world. So this is a very flexible global market that you can buy and sell, you know, pretty much in any part of the market. And the market will help that barrel of oil find its way to the most efficient destination. So this, you know, evolved over time. And it made the prospect of using energy as a weapon less attractive

11:54because the market could diffuse the shock of cutting off a single supplier. So that was one of the reasons. The other reason it's important to note is that in 1973, we had we ushered in this like very difficult decade for the world, as you mentioned, emerging markets as well as the United States. And the countries that initiated that embargo, those Arab countries didn't actually achieve their political objectives. So they just ushered in a new era of energy

12:24where a lot of countries decided to kind of pull back on oil, where you had a lot of initiatives that actually diminished the demand for oil and they didn't serve their political objectives. So these were part of the rethink around the energy weapon. But I would say the most important thing is that the world's energy markets continue to become more and more integrated. We saw investment cross political lines. You say British and American investment in the former Soviet Union. And we moved into this period of energy abundance.

12:56And I write about this in the book that you kindly mentioned at the beginning. That energy abundance was partially because we had investment and we had technologies coming forward. I'd mentioned the shale boom in the United States where you brought huge amounts of new oil to the global market. So America went from becoming a pretty significant importer of oil, 60 percent of its oil being imported before the shale boom, to now being a net exporter of oil.

13:28So we were in this era of energy abundance and it was complemented by other forms of energy coming online. So it's not just oil. It's natural gas. It's in the form of LNG, again, a much more liquid market for natural gas. We have renewables coming online, other forms of energy creating a moment for the world, longer than a moment, of energy abundance. And in this world, countries from the United States to China just felt more comfortable that they don't need to worry about energy scarcity, that they can rely on the market to meet their energy needs.

14:00So weaponization was no longer something that countries thought that much about. They thought the market's going to deliver it. I don't need to worry about that so much. And so take us from that moment to the moment where it becomes this weapon that countries think about using and then clearly successfully deploy. Yeah. So I think we start to see the conditions under which weaponization becomes more attractive. Let's just say five years ago, the moment where it becomes very clear and obvious, of course, is the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the use of natural gas as a weapon by Russia.

14:39I would point out Russia started to use natural gas as a weapon to set the stage for its invasion of Ukraine the year before, back in 2021, where it began to buy up the natural gas that Russia had in its storage. It began to limit the amount of natural gas it was selling to Europe so that Europe wouldn't have a lot of stocks. It wouldn't have a lot of resilience in the face of a cutoff. But that was a moment where it became very clear that, in fact, despite all the abundance that I just talked about in oil and gas and other energy sources, energy was still very much a tool of foreign policy.

15:19But why that became a reality, I think, has more to do with our geopolitics, that we went from being a world 30 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, where politics were pretty copacetic. You didn't have great power rivalry. You didn't have Russia and China and the United States and Europe all, you know, at each other's throats. Think about it. Even when I wrote my book not so long ago, we were still in the phase where we're trying to integrate China into the global economy. So it's just around this time, around the time of COVID and then a couple of years later with the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, that we're really in an era of great power competition.

16:01And in that era, the countries that are in competition are looking for the best tools that they have to use. In a world of growing fragmentation of the global economy post-COVID, we're finding that this global integration that I spoke about isn't providing the same kind of reassurance to countries that it did in a world where politics were much more conducive to peace and prosperity. So it's a combination of these factors. It's the energy system itself, it's great power rivalry returning, and it's the kind of the slowdown or the changing nature of globalization that create the circumstance where the energy weapon is ripe for usage.

16:44And now that you mentioned an article that Jason Bordoff and I wrote, that was at the end of last year, and basically we're saying, get ready, put on your seatbelt, more energy weaponization ahead, and certainly that's what we're seeing in 2026. You certainly did predict or at least warn that a moment like this with the Strait of Hormuz shut off could hurt all of us. Another prediction you kind of made in windfall, Megan, if I may, is that you suggested that low oil prices would leave Russia economically stressed, which in turn could make it more likely to turn to military distractions.

17:20And here we are. I have to ask you on that. I mean, oil prices are high again. Do you see Russia as a winner from the current conflict in the Middle East? And does this then templatize that kind of a strategy from from petro states to stir up conflicts and drive up the price of oil? I mean, certainly Russia and the former Soviet Union, I would say, has thought about stirring up geopolitical tensions as a way of increasing the price of oil. This has been documented for people who are historians and have looked through the Politburo notes from the end of the Soviet empire that it's been it was actively debated whether the Soviet Union should stir up problems in the Middle East simply to increase the price of oil.

18:05So I wouldn't go so far as to say that Russia had any particular hand in this in instigating this phase of this conflict. But I agree with you that for the moment, you know, Russia is really benefiting from this. And it's not only in the oil prices, as you well know, it's just it's in the distraction. It's in the geopolitics. It's in the divisions, I would say, more than anything. The divisions that are coming between the United States and its NATO allies that are of great benefit to Russia.

18:40So I see that, you know, economically, this helps Russia. I don't know that it will help Russia to the extent that it has just resisted reform. It's resisted the idea that a petro state can exist indefinitely in this geopolitical age. I'm still of the view that the world is going to continue its its pursuit of a more sustainable global energy economy over time.

19:11That timeline may have been pushed out by this conflict and other realities. But I don't think we're going to reverse course on that. And ultimately, Russia under Putin has shown no interest and certainly has made no effort to try to position itself for a world where maybe oil isn't as valuable a commodity as it is right now. We'll be back in a minute with more of Foreign Policy Live. Remember, you can catch these conversations live and on video on foreignpolicy.com.

19:47Subscribers get to send us questions in advance in addition to a range of other benefits, including our magazine. Sign up. So I want to talk about the rest of the world for a couple of minutes. It's striking to me that the United States is quite relatively insulated when it comes to energy shocks. I mean, the price at the pump is up by about a third. But if you look at the rest of the world, they're suffering way more in a variety of ways.

20:22And many of our subscribers, Matthew Shabataris, Journey Boyden, wanted me to bring this up. The point being that, you know, when you add in the fact that the dollar is stronger and people in the global south are generally poorer, less able to ride an energy price shock. Is there anything that countries, policymakers should be thinking about to protect themselves from an era where more countries deploy the energy weapon, as you've put it? And we could be entering an era where there are more shocks that disproportionately tend to impact smaller countries and poorer countries.

21:00Can I take that in two parts, Ravi? Just like first the point about the U.S. and then what other countries might do. The point about the U.S. I think is very well taken. That, of course, the suffering that is happening in the American economy is relatively mild compared to other parts of the world. And it also it's affecting the U.S. economy in a very different way than an oil shock in the 1970s did. Because, again, as I mentioned, America now being a net exporter of oil means that when the price of oil goes up, it's of huge benefit to U.S. companies, U.S. energy companies.

21:43And so we've actually seen in March, we've seen record amounts of exports of U.S. refined petroleum products and very high exports of American LNG. So that accrues to American producers in the American economy, which changes and which I think is still a political issue, as President Trump is feeling, is that the distribution of that wealth changes inside of America rather than between America and, say, the Middle East. So what we have is consumers bear some of the costs, but producers and companies are benefiting.

22:19So it's an interesting political point. On the other part of your question about what other countries might do, and Jason Bordoff and I wrote about this in a foreign affairs article. We call it the Iran shock and the dangerous illusion of energy autarky, which is the idea that many countries are probably feeling, wow, exposure to this global market is dangerous and we want to pull away from this global market. Now, that could manifest itself in a number of ways.

22:51If you're China, it might mean you're going to stockpile energy. We actually saw Fatih Barol, the executive director of the International Energy Agency, just in the last day or so, warn countries, none by name, but warn countries generally, don't stockpile, this is going to worsen the crisis. We need to all continue to have confidence in the global market. So it's one thing to say that to countries. When it comes to oil and gas, continuing to be integrated into the global market is going to be better than the alternatives.

23:25Things like putting up tariffs or subsidies, all of that is actually probably going to make managing the economic dislocation even more difficult. However, a longer term issue is try to produce more of your energy at home. If you're the United States, you have the option of producing more oil and gas, and a lot of people in the current administration will opt in that direction. But most countries will adopt this advice by saying, like, is there more I can do in terms of renewable energy, electrification, and can I make my economy more dependent on the kind of energy that I can produce within my own border?

24:03And interestingly enough, this is going to give a boost to the energy transition. It's going to give a boost to the energy transition because most of the kinds of energy that you can produce in countries and consume in countries that don't have favorable geology are going to be renewable energy. The downside is, of course, this is going to make many more countries and economies, at least in the medium term, susceptible to political and economic pressure from China.

24:34Because China is the country that has a real dominance over clean energy supply chains. So again, the energy weapon is back, but it's not just the old weapon. It's not just oil and gas. It's also weaponization of clean energy supply chains. If we're entering a world in which you have the petrostates on the one hand and the electrostates on the other hand, as you're saying, this just incentivizes a lot of countries to look to China as a potential partner, or at least any country that's willing to offer it clean energy.

25:07But, you know, on the clean energy question, you've also argued in the past that many proponents of clean energy had hoped that the energy transition will make tensions over energy resources a thing of the past. And yet the opposite has happened, right? So clean energy has boomed, but tensions are higher than ever. What do you think happened there? I mean, did the world just underweight the possibility of war? Well, I think the world was projecting an energy transition in a status quo political environment.

25:43So it was thinking about what the energy transition was going to look like as it went forward. And it was thinking about politics continuing to be the politics of the post-Cold War era, where this moment in time allowed climate and allowed the energy transition to be one of the primary drivers of policy. And in certain parts of the world, for instance, Europe, this was one of the most important animators of policy was the need to address the climate problem. And this big shift in geopolitics has at least put this endeavor in the context of other issues that most policymakers and many voters seem to think are more pressing.

26:27National security issues, energy security issues, just questions of prosperity and meeting basic needs. And in that context, I think we have to look at the whole question of clean energy geopolitics. I also think it was just a little bit of a naivete, the idea that somehow we have these pernicious oil and gas geopolitics, you know, this sense that the geopolitics of oil have been so correlated with wars and conflicts and tensions, but that there was something about renewable energy that was going to exempt it from the same tensions.

27:04Now, if we do a racking and stacking, and if you and I had more time, we could identify, yeah, there are differences in clean energy, some of which make it less susceptible to geopolitical manipulation, but some of it which make it equally acceptable. For instance, just think about how much enriched uranium the United States uses for its nuclear power plants that comes from Russia. So I think it just took the energy and the environmental community a while to acknowledge a reality, that energy of all kinds is deeply tied to our political structure because it is the backbone of our global economy.

27:44And any changes to the backbone of our global economy are going to bring with them huge geopolitical changes. Some of them will be good, and some of them will be very challenging to manage. You know, and I feel like in the last few weeks, we're all talking about the choke point that is the Strait of Hormuz, but I remember for much of last year, the choke point that grabbed our attention was, of course, China's control of rare earths and critical minerals, which it has a strangled hold on, at least the processing of it.

28:14And those are key components in solar and electric vehicles, for example, and, you know, they exercised their strangled hold on that choke hold. And that was a real problem that every policymaker begun to acknowledge. I think that's exactly right. I mean, they're not exactly equivalent, the Strait of Hormuz and the choke hold on the clean energy supply chains. They have a lot of parallels, and they have a lot of policymakers asking themselves the question, if we move away from oil and gas to clean energy, are we just swapping one dependency and one strategic vulnerability for another?

28:55And I would say it's worth doing the, you know, the intellectual math. When it comes to the geopolitical strongholds or choke points surrounding clean energy, these are things that can be replicated in other places. They may be expensive. It may take time. Bringing manufacturing to places where it has left, bringing processing plants to places where processing has left, you know, is difficult and politically difficult in particular, but it is doable. Having, you know, physical choke points and geological dependencies is a little bit difficult and harder to inoculate against.

29:36Of course, I expect countries, after this conflict in the Gulf right now is over, are going to find ways to get oil and natural gas out of the Gulf without going through the Straits of Hormuz. There will be pipelines, there will be all kinds of innovations beyond the two kind of backup pipelines that have really been fundamental to mitigating some of the stress of this moment. So there'll be innovations, but there are some realities around the oil and gas trade that will continue to be physical, while the clean energy world, I think, has a little bit more opportunity to diversify, although over a 5, 10, 15-year period.

30:15You know, you foreshadowed a question I was going to put to you from a subscriber, Lindsay Howard, who wanted to know what kinds of new frameworks or arrangements you might envision within a new Strait of Hormuz security and trade regime that could emerge if this war ends. And as you think about that, Megan, the corresponding big question I have is that, you know, we're in a moment of increased war. And what's clear is that whenever you have a war, so much of the old ways just don't matter because you're at war.

30:49But then even within war, there are rules of wars, and those rules aren't being followed either. You have war crimes being threatened from all sides and being conducted by all sides right now. And within all of that, how do you begin to emerge from this moment once the war ends to think about rules again? You know, how do you build trust to create rules around the flow of energy and the flow of oil? Yeah. I mean, it's a very big question, Ravi. I do think that we will have a period of institutional and architectural innovation after this conflict has ended.

31:28And I welcome that because I think it's an area that we need to focus in on again. In terms of the energy side, it's feasible to me and even likely that we will, I'd like to say inshallah, as they do in the Middle East, God willing, come out of this crisis with more multilateral engagement around the Strait of Hormuz and around the security there. And more engagement among the Gulf states with one another for security in that part of the world.

32:00This, I think, is useful in part because it will create a more politically sustainable environment for the United States, which, of course, every president who has found himself dragged back into the Middle East has had to deal with a lot of political questions about the sustainability of an approach where America has devoted so many resources to, among other things, helping ensure the free flow of oil that goes largely to China and other parts of Asia.

32:31This is a political question in American politics that I expected would be a much bigger one a long time ago. But this, I think, will be new architecture. You, Ravi, raised the larger question about the rules-based system. This war and how it is being conducted and what might happen in the days and weeks ahead, I think, are a profound concern to those of us who really believed in the liberal international order as being one that was far from perfect, but one in which this general acknowledgement of a certain set of rules and a certain set of institution

33:11and a set of norms that didn't have global adherence but certainly had the adherence of the United States and many other actors was something that was important to global stability and ultimately prosperity. And I think building back that sense of confidence both in the United States and in other partners and allies is going to be extremely important work as we look to stabilize the global economy and the system after this period of time.

33:44I'm not sure that this conflict is going to be the thing that pulls everybody back. It might pitch us even further forward into a world where these norms and institutions are being strained. If this ends up being a war that creates fundamental fissures in NATO, then we're going to be further down the path of destruction of the liberal international order, not closer to rebuilding it. But, you know, I think there's a lot that remains unanswered before we know exactly if we're at the turning point yet or not.

34:19You know, Megan, you've literally written the book on America's energy abundance. The United States has this huge gift. I mean, people are often surprised when they learn that America is the world's biggest oil producer, the world's biggest natural gas producer. Has it surprised you that so much of its recent policy and its recent conflicts have involved oil? I mean, whether it's Venezuela or now the Middle East, even if that wasn't the genesis of it for the Middle East, it's ended up becoming salient at some level.

34:54Has this abundance led to a reckless foreign policy? Well, I would say that this abundance has definitely given America and America's leaders more flexibility, more strategic room to make foreign policy decisions without being really hampered by thinking about what this means for America's energy security. And so I always I talked about this in Windfall, but I've always thought about what does energy independence mean?

35:24And I think if you asked five Americans what it means, everybody would have a different definition. People have often thought about it as just not having to rely on any other country, kind of an energy autarchy. We're not there. We're in American energy independence in the sense that energy does not have to be the number one or number two consideration on policymakers when they think about is a foreign policy or a national security strategy going to be in America's interest.

35:55Energy is not at the top of that priority list. And I think that's a good thing. That said, I have been surprised, particularly on the Venezuela front, Iran seems to make a little bit more strategic sense. I don't think it was primarily about oil, but the centrality of oil in Venezuela and in President Trump's the way that he spoke about Venezuela, the way that he talked about his motivation for taking action in Venezuela, being so oil centric was very surprising to me.

36:26It was surprising to me in part because it seemed to harken back to an age of resource nationalism that America hasn't taken part of in, you know, I don't know, easily 100 years. This idea that somehow the use of force and the ownership of oil would be connected and the physical ownership of oil. So even if you look at the first Gulf War in 1991, you could say oil was related there, but it was about the strategic disposition.

36:56Who controlled the oil? Was Saddam going to be in control of Iraqi, Kuwaiti, Saudi oil? Not that America wanted to be physically in control of that oil, but it wanted to make sure that no one authoritarian leader had control over it. But in Venezuela, President Trump very explicitly said this is about taking control of the oil. And to me, it was harkening back again to a very old frame of thinking, but it also didn't really make sense to me. In a world where the price of oil was bumping along at $65 and American producers were struggling to make ends meet with such a low oil price,

37:35to claim that we should use American military prowess to try to bring more Venezuelan oil onto the global market, I didn't see how that made sense for America commercially, except in the one narrow sense, which is not insignificant, but keeping China and Russia from really having the ability to develop Venezuela's oil. That may be a legitimate foreign policy interest, but certainly not just simply wanting more Venezuelan oil on the market. Iran, and I'll be very brief on this, again, I don't think this has been about oil, but it has certainly turned into being about oil.

38:12And I'm extremely nervous about that. And the reasons for this goes back to the time that I spent in Iraq. I spent about two years in Iraq immediately after Saddam fled and then throughout the years that followed off and on. And America's 2003 war in Iraq was about primarily weapons of mass destruction. It was not about gaining control over Iraqi oil. But to this day, most Iraqis, when they try to make sense of the American intervention, they come back to oil, that it must have been about Iraqi oil.

38:48So in a world where President Trump said over the weekend he wishes he could just take the oil, well, that's what he'd like to do if the American people would allow him to. I think this is going to be rhetoric that we're going to hear throughout Iranian politics for a long time to come and not to America's benefit. Wow. It's a really good way of thinking about it. Megan, we'll have to leave it there. Thank you so much. Thank you, Ravi. Great to be with you.

39:14And that was Megan O'Sullivan, professor at Harvard, director of the Belfer Center and the author of Windfall. Lots more coming up on FPLive later this week. Did the United States agree to a ceasefire too soon? We'll have a debate with John Bolton, a longtime Iran hawk. And as always, stay abreast of all our coverage by visiting foreignpolicy.com. FPLive, the podcast, is produced by Rosie Julin.

39:45The executive producer of the show is Dana Schoen. And I'm Ravi Agrawal. I'll see you next time. I'll see you next time.