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Canada, Mexico defend trilateral trade agreement with US
The world’s biggest economy is the main market for Canadian and Mexican exports.
EU, Canada seek strength amid US threats
Canada announced more than $25 billion in defense and infrastructure projects in the Arctic.
Russia emerges as biggest winner in Iran war
Soaring oil prices pushed the White House to lift sanctions on the sale of Russian crude currently at sea.
Stock markets slump, oil closes above $100
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US tanker plane crashes in Iraq, killing four
It is the fourth US manned aircraft lost since the Iran war began.
Transcript: Trump Outburst over Oil Shock Goes Awry as Advisers Panic
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 13 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.The global fiasco that Donald Trump has created around the Strait of Hormuz is rapidly getting worse. An international agency says the closing of the strait is creating the largest global oil supply disruption in history. And a striking New York Times report outlines the enormous consequences this is starting to have for the world economy. There’s still no sign that Trump knows how to get out of this mess. CNN reports that there’s rising alarm and urgency within the administration over it, and Trump just unleashed a bizarre tweet about the situation that underscores just how lost he truly is.One of our go-to guests on topics like this is international relations professor Nicholas Grossman, who recently argued that the Iran war is demonstrating to Trump the limits of sheer bullying—which Trump thinks can accomplish anything. We’re talking to him about all of it. Nick, good to have you on.Nicholas Grossman: Hi, good to be back.Sargent: So Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz, creating a global oil shock, which seems to have been anticipated by everybody except the commander in chief of the world’s most powerful military. The International Energy Agency just announced that this is causing, quote, “the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.” Nick, can you boil down what that really means?Grossman: It means widespread economic disruption. There is reliance on energy through all aspects of the economy. There are also additional oil effects—things like uses for metallurgy processes, for example, different byproducts used for agriculture—and oil is a global commodity, meaning that it is produced in many different places. The United States both imports and exports; it refines products, it drills crude oil, and all of this is on a day-of supply chain. So when things get disrupted, there’s a little slack in the system, but really not much, and then the prices go up. A 20 percent supply decline is incredibly disruptive—it means that there is simply not enough oil to go around.This was the explicit thing that we saw coming. By “we,” I mean the broad national security community. It is very likely that people inside the military and the national security establishment told this to the White House—whether Trump himself heard it, or didn’t listen, or others tried to tell him, who knows. But this was the exact reason why we said: Yes, confront Iran, but in smarter ways, as opposed to this one thing. This is their big leverage—don’t play into it. And now the U.S. has, and it’s not going to clear up soon.Sargent: Well, The New York Times had a striking piece on the consequences you’re talking about, reporting that it’s delivering what they called a “stunning punch” to the global economy—higher oil prices everywhere, higher fertilizer prices, shipping costs soaring, and so forth. Can you talk a little bit more about what these consequences could start to look like if this goes on for, I don’t know, maybe more than two or three more days?Grossman: So when it comes to the actual oil, there are problems with the oil industry itself in that the tankers aren’t moving, the supply depots are filling up, they might have to reduce production and stop various wells—and those things are difficult to restart. They are costly. That takes some time. So there would be built-in delays almost no matter what. And that assumes that things clear up quickly—that the U.S. stops right away, and even if the U.S. does that, Iran stops right away.But beyond that, where we will see it is things like higher gas prices, which is probably one that will be evident to tons of people. Effects on the stock market could make inflation overall worse. The longer it goes on—the more because energy costs are in just about everything—the more it will make overall prices rise. And then there are all the political implications of that, domestic and geopolitical.Sargent: Yeah. And so CNN reports that Trump officials themselves are starting to seriously panic about all this. The CNN report says those officials have “frantically” sought ways to ease the crisis—they’re exploring a whole bunch of options, like getting oil companies involved, things like that, unleashing reserves, that type of thing. Nick, what do you make of that panic? When it really comes down to it, there’s not a whole lot the administration can do here. Isn’t that sort of the essence of the problem?Grossman: Yeah, they ran into something that they can’t bullshit their way through. This reminds me of COVID in the first term—although in this case it’s something of Trump’s own doing.His initial reaction to COVID was to continue to praise China, to praise Xi, to say that it wasn’t really happening, to kind of just pretend it wasn’t. And then it became overwhelming—it overwhelmed him, the globe, and the country. And yeah, he lied about it in different ways, but still, everybody knew there was a pandemic and there were economic problems that were associated with it, no matter what he said. And this is a similar thing: It has gone beyond his control.In a way, it was a smaller operation, and they got a little lucky with Venezuela—it went so smoothly—and apparently they thought they could get away with something much bigger, or that Iran would simply fold, or who knows what. But one of the oldest things that they paid no attention to is the idea that the enemy always gets a vote—when it comes to war, the enemy always gets a vote in the battle plan.In attacking Iran so strongly, they created a situation that is out of their control. Iran gets a big say in how this goes. Israel gets a say in how this goes. Increasingly, the countries of the Gulf and others that Iran is attacking are going to be involved in saying how it goes. Other world powers—the longer this goes on, the more it is disrupting all of their economies—they’re going to have a say. And Iran has a particular position of military advantage by having so much land access to this narrow waterway, which is the only access point. Therefore, they can continue disrupting it for an indefinite amount of time.Iran doesn’t have all that much difficulty closing the strait and keeping it going long beyond where the United States wants it to be open. It would take a considerable amount of military force—more than the U.S. has there currently in the region—to be able to open it up. France has even talked about perhaps sending something to do so, but that would be weeks away. Even beyond that, Iran can effectively close the strait not by keeping the military forces of other countries out, but by just threatening ships enough that the shipping companies don’t think it’s profitable to sail, that the insurance companies don’t think it’s profitable to insure the ships—then they just won’t do it, and the supply disruption will go on.Iran at this point has a pretty strong incentive to make it so that the war is not only one that they manage to survive, but one that they can turn into a cautionary tale—where whenever, say, the U.S. or Israel thinks of trying it again, people in their countries, other countries around the world, and especially partners in the Gulf start saying, No, remember what happened last time, don’t do it. So Iran is now partially in control of how this goes. Of course, the United States military is stronger, is able to destroy a lot of things in Iran, and has a big say in how it goes. But the overall events and the economic damage are out of Trump’s control and not something that he can bullshit his way through. Sargent: He can’t bullshit his way through it, and he can’t bomb his way out of it either, as far as I can tell. Trump had some really weird tweets about this. Earlier this week, he said that short-term price hikes are a very small price to pay for world peace, adding, “ONLY FOOLS WOULD THINK DIFFERENTLY.” Now he just tweeted that “The United States is the largest oil producer in the world. So when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money.”Then he said he’s heroically protecting us from Iran’s nukes and all that. Nick, we don’t make money when oil prices go up, do we? To me, this underscores just how lost he is on all of it.Grossman: On that one specifically, I looked up the stocks, and a good way to illustrate this is ExxonMobil went up and Chevron went up. And the S&P went down, the Nasdaq went down, the Dow went down, and the rest. Yeah, maybe a few oil companies make money off of higher oil prices—and you know who else does? Russia. But that doesn’t mean that the overall economy is helped, because the overall economy is energy consumers, not energy producers or energy product sellers. It is like a tax on the entire economy.It’s going to raise prices and reduce spending power for people on everything else, because most people need the energy that they currently consume. If you commute to work, you still have to pay the higher gas prices. If a business is shipping things, they still have to pay to ship in order to sell. And no, that’s not something he can bullshit his way through.Sargent: A bunch of people piled on Trump for that remark about us making more money from this whole thing. Patrick De Haan, a petroleum analyst, said: “Americans today will spend roughly $250 million more on gasoline than they did 30 days ago.” Representative Don Beyer, a Democrat, said: “Fortunately for his big oil donors, Trump doesn’t mind your pain at the pump since they are going to make a lot of money.” I thought that was some interesting stuff—because you may recall, Nick, that during the campaign, one of the most corrupt things that happened in the 2024 campaign is that Donald Trump met with a bunch of big oil people and essentially said, Raise me a billion dollars for my campaign and I will carry out your whole wish list of policy demands. He essentially said, I will govern in your interests if you give me money.Grossman: The donor part is certainly influential. I think that can help explain various energy policies—hostility towards renewable energy, for example, widespread pro-drilling policies and trying to expand that. But overall, a lot of the stuff with the war—you can include Venezuela in this, also—he seemed to think that they would like it, and I don’t think they do. Energy companies might see a little bit of profit now from higher prices, but a stable global economy is much more in their interest. If there ends up being a crashing economy, that really isn’t what they want. I wouldn’t think that they worked to get this.But I see that more as a symptom of Trump having no real idea why the United States is doing this. There is no articulation of a goal. You can contrast this even with the war in Iraq—for all its many problems, the Bush administration said that the United States was going to do regime change by force, was going to remove Saddam Hussein, was going to install a democracy. There’d be an elected government. The U.S. would train the security services and leave. And again, I don’t want to downplay the problems at all—that is broadly what happened, and the U.S. put in the ground force that could accomplish something like that. There is none of that here, so little of the planning. And Trump seems to be flitting from answer to answer, doing his usual whatever-I-think-the-person-in-front-of-me-might-want-to-hear thing. And it’s having to change so rapidly because none of them really make sense—none of them are catching on in the way that sometimes his lies can, because the offensives are too big and because he cannot control them.Sargent: That’s really the essence of this—his inability to control things. In a funny way, you’re actually seeing the revenge of an interdependent world. On some level, Donald Trump, as you wrote, just thinks he can bully his way toward accomplishing anything, to the degree that he even has goals.He never takes seriously the idea that we are interdependent—it’s not something that really registers in his head in any significant way. He just thinks—and the MAGA ideologues around Trump have an even more pernicious and elaborate version of this idea in their heads—American power can do whatever it wants and everything is going to be shaped by that. We keep learning that that’s not true. And now we’re really learning it. Grossman: It seems like this is the point where they really did push things beyond their limits.I’d say they were straining the system in various ways—straining alliances, as with the Ukraine war; denigrating Canada, or making threats to Canada; demands to ... have Denmark give the United States Greenland. And then even escalating to things like the boat bombings, committing a bunch of war crimes and getting away with that. And with Venezuela—it went smoother in the sense that Venezuela couldn’t get lucky and shoot down U.S. aircraft. Maduro could have dodged it and then the U.S. would have had to escalate. So there were a variety of possibilities, but they got lucky and it looked good on TV and it was over pretty quickly and it was smooth. Here they ran into something that isn’t.There’s a pretty good antecedent of it with Trump’s cheering of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—when it first happened, he was clearly impressed. In an interview, he called it savvy. He called it genius. He said Putin’s move is wonderful. All those direct quotes, anybody can look them up. What that reflected was that he expected it to work. It wasn’t just his normal Putin affinity, Russia affinity—he really thought it was going to work. And Ukraine managing to stand up to Russia, or even NATO and Denmark responding and standing up to the United States, Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum standing up to the United States—whenever this happens, they seem somewhat genuinely surprised.When you combine really feeling themselves after Venezuela with this idea that bullying is not only correct and right but that it should work—that it’s going to work, that everybody else is weak and we’re strong, so you just act strong and they act weak and they fold—they ran into people with Iran who aren’t going to do that. While the U.S. military is bigger and can destroy a lot of things in Iran and can do a lot of damage, it is probably not going to be able to subdue the Iranians, make the government collapse, or end the war in a way that looks like a quick American victory.Sargent: This idea that Trump doesn’t anticipate pushback is quite interesting. I think you actually saw this in Minneapolis in a funny way. You probably saw the viral pictures online which showed the woman in slippers and a bathrobe filming ICE with her little cell phone. And that really captured what you’re talking about. Stephen Miller clearly thought that if he went out and just started beating the shit out of immigrants with his paramilitary thugs, people would just sort of roll over and accept that. But you’ve seen a whole lot of ordinary people show extraordinary heroism and go out there and resist—with their presence and with their documentation of what’s happening. You can almost see this through line from Minneapolis right to all these other areas where they just keep running into unanticipated resistance, and they just never think it’s going to happen and it keeps happening.Grossman: Absolutely. It applies to Minneapolis really well. When they run into reality and find that the enemy is just regular people trying to live their lives—for example, a community where some people are immigrants and some people aren’t and they all more or less get along, in the normal community sense—they get surprised and they don’t really know what to do except maybe lash out more. It might be the case that that also contributed to going to war abroad, in that the use of violence at home was running into more difficulties than they had expected. And the U.S. military is decently more powerful than ICE or any domestic force. And so they could use it to do things like blow up boats in the Caribbean and then even remove a foreign head of state. And then who knows—maybe settle the Iran issue once and for all. And there was no possibility that last one could have worked.Sargent: Yeah, absolutely. So just to close this out briefly—where do you think this goes from here? How do you anticipate it unfolding over the next month, two months, three months? There’s a scenario where Trump tries to declare victory and go home—I don’t know if that’s going to happen or not. What do you think is going to happen? If he were to do that, would he be able to extricate us from the situation in the Strait of Hormuz and the global mess he’s creating, never mind the absolute humanitarian catastrophe he leaves behind? What’s your reading on what’s coming?Grossman: That’s really hard to say. In part, if anybody claims anything definitive about what’s going to happen, they are wrong—at least about the part that they’re confident in, even if they turn out right. War is too chaotic, too unpredictable, with too many different factors and too many players for that to be the case.That said, I can see everything from it ending pretty quickly—maybe as the economic damage spreads, it becomes clear that any sort of manipulation, like, Hey, we almost have victory—which he tried a day ago, and it did seem to make markets bounce back for a very brief amount of time—can’t overcome the reality of the situation. Maybe Trump says, I’ll try to lie my way to claiming victory, saying there was great damage. And maybe then Israel goes along with that thinking: It was a bigger version of the 12-day war and we weakened Iran a lot. And maybe even Iran says, You know what, as long as we survived and we made our point and now everybody knows we have more leverage, we’ll all stop. So that could in theory happen—tomorrow, a few days. But part of the problem with that is it will have lasting economic damage for something that really doesn’t look like a success or a victory to anybody but the most hardcore Trump supporters and a few people who prioritize Israeli security above everything else. So I think that one’s more unlikely.It also could go on for months, in one fashion or another. It could escalate to the United States introducing some ground troops, saying that is the only possible way to open the Strait of Hormuz. If it doesn’t work—if Iran doesn’t back down from cutting off that oil access—then we might see American, and perhaps even European and other forces try to force it open, and the war could still be going months from now. So I really don’t know. I just know that there is absolutely no path forward from here that is not highly disruptive and leaves things worse off than before he made this decision.Sargent: Nick Grossman, that is a good place to end. Very well put and very well summarized. Great to talk to you as always, man.Grossman: Yep. Thanks for having me.
Democratic Voters Don’t Want Vanilla Centrism
You can watch this conversation above, on Substack, or YouTube. I joined journalist Wajahat Ali’s Substack show The Left Hook. We discuss the policy differences between Democratic Party leaders and voters, including my recent article showing that moderate Democratic voters are quite liberal on many issues. In contrast, many centrist Democratic strategists and politicians are very critical of progressive stances. Ali argues Democratic leaders are still misguidedly chasing a hypothetical swing voter who they believe is white, male, and fairly conservative. I suggest that part of the tension between Democratic voters and politicians is that the latter raise money from superwealthy people, who often oppose tax hikes on corporations and the rich and increases in government spending. We also discuss the war with Iran, including my recent piece blasting it as misguided and ill conceived.
Bush Sr. Solved the Acid Rain Problem. Trump Is Bringing It Back.
Images of black rain pelting one of the world’s oldest civilizations, after the United States and Israel bombed Iran’s oil depots this week, are tough to unsee. Many news outlets are calling it “acid rain”—a term that may understate the problem, since the smog caused by this bombing is likely even more toxic than typical air pollution. While there’s stiff competition for the most horrifying headline out of this war so far (given the disregard for civilian lives and the complete lack of an endgame), this one feels particularly surreal—a nightmarish blast from the past. Acid rain is not a phrase we have heard much in recent years. That’s because it is a problem that was largely solved during the first Bush administration. The phrase was probably first coined in the nineteenth century by a chemist named Robert Angus Smith, to describe the polluted rain in Manchester, England—a place whose industrial pollution was hauntingly described by Elizabeth Gaskell in her novel North and South, as well as by Friedrich Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England—but it was not taken seriously by North American scientists, or popularized in the United States, until the 1960s, when ecologist Gene Likens discovered that air pollution caused by fossil fuels, when transmitted by rain into ecosystems, was devastating animal and plant life. At that point, acid rain became a target of serious campaigning, argument, and, of course, denial—much like climate change is today. When I was a child in the 1970s and ’80s, acid rain was one of the leading environmental problems in public discourse. The Reagan administration, whose environmental policy was helmed by James Watt, a millenarian Christian who opposed most environmental regulation because Jesus was just about to come back anyway, did not care about acid rain. But when Reagan’s vice president, George H.W. Bush, ran for president in 1988, he needed a swing issue to appeal to voters who were tired of right-wing Reaganism, one that would be authentic to him as an older-style Republican who enjoyed the outdoors. So he promised to address acid rain. Amazingly enough, he kept that promise, fighting congresspeople in his own party to do so, ultimately enacting the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. Those reforms set up a “cap and trade” system for acid rain. The system worked far better than expected, achieving far more reduction in acid rain at lower cost than anticipated, by dramatically reducing power plant pollution. Acid rain is an underrated triumph of regulation. It’s part of how we know we can solve the climate crisis and many other problems associated with fossil fuel pollution. Now, however, it’s also a lesson in how important it is to defend such gains: The images from Iran show that one bad policy decision can literally bring back life-threatening pollution overnight. Iranians have been advised to stay indoors, as the black rain can have serious health effects, including chemical burns and lung damage.Toxic, black rain adds another layer—literally—of horror to what Iranians are enduring. But although it won’t be as immediate or as extreme, acid rain could be coming for us too. Trump’s domestic policies may bring this old problem back to the U.S.Last year, Likens—the scientist whose discoveries made so much difference in the fight against acid rain in the last century—told The Guardian that Trump’s current assault on clear air and clean water regulations could pitch the U.S. back into a new era of acid rain. Now 91, Likens was in meetings all day as I wrote this column and therefore could not comment (understandably, the man is in demand). In the 2025 Guardian interview, he called acid rain a “major environmental success story” and warned that if Trump relaxed controls on emissions, “we are going to destroy that success story.” This won’t happen here overnight, and one mitigating factor is that there are so many fewer coal plants than there were in the acid rain days (something that Trump would also love to change, of course). But there are other sources—and therefore, other urgent causes for worry. In February, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency specifically weakened restrictions on sulphur dioxide emissions from gas-burning power plants. Sulphur dioxide (as acknowledged by the EPA’s own website) was one of the leading causes of acid rain.We tend to dissociate from images like those of the black rain in Iran, feeling awful about them but also confident they won’t affect us. But Trump is a worldwide problem, and at the same time as his regime is committing potential war crimes in Iran, it is also destroying our own society and ecosystems in ways that will take years to repair. Acid rain is a problem no one ever wanted. Leave it to Trump—a creature fundamentally of the reactionary 1980s—to bring back one of the most unpleasant and deadly features of that decade, undoing progress led by a member of his own political party.
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