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2026-03-13 00:09:15

Donald Trump says he’s bombing Iran to prevent the regime from obtaining a nuclear weapon. But he may be providing with Tehran more incentive to sprint toward developing a nuclear bomb, which is now easier for Iran to make—thanks to Trump.

After Trump, during his first White House stint, ripped up the Iran nuclear deal that President Barack Obama and other world leaders had negotiated with Tehran in 2015, Iran responded by enriching its uranium to a much higher level than it had been doing under the agreement. Because of that move, it now possesses an estimated 970 pounds of highly enriched uranium that’s a lot closer to the level of refinement needed for bomb-grade material. And international nuclear inspectors—who were able to keep track of Iran’s uranium stockpile before Trump bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities in June—aren’t sure where this uranium is now.

In short, with his war in Iran, Trump has created a big, possibly catastrophic problem: A half-ton of highly enriched uranium, which can be made bomb-ready, is somewhere…out there—available for use by Iran’s new regime or perhaps not fully secured and susceptible to theft or expropriation.

I spoke to Joe Cirincione, a veteran nuclear policy expert, about this stockpile and the challenges it presents.

He notes that it would not take much for Iran to enrich this material—a gaseous form of uranium—from its present state of 60-percent enrichment to the 90-percent level necessary for a bomb. (Uranium at the 60-percent level can be used for a crude and large bomb that would be akin to the weapon dropped on Hiroshima but not a bomb that could be delivered by a missile.) He points out that under the Iran deal that Trump rejected, Iran had only been enriching uranium to the 4-percent level.

Once uranium is enriched to 90 percent, there are other critical steps required to manufacture a bomb that Cirincione estimates could take Iran nine months to a year, and this could happen perhaps even after the massive US-Israeli bombing campaign on the country.

So, Cirincione says, when Trump, to justify the war, proclaimed Iran was two weeks away from producing a nuclear weapon, he was misleading the public. And he was also wrong to have boasted of destroying Iran’s nuclear program last year. “This is the great fallacy of the June bombing, where Trump said he obliterated the program,” Cirincione remarks. “All of us knew at the time he hadn’t gotten that 60-percent enriched uranium. It was too deeply buried…So now it’s sitting there as literally a ticking time bomb.”

Then what ought to be done now about this treasure chest of uranium that is believed to be at a facility deep underground near the city of Isfahan? Cirincione says there are only two alternatives:

The United States either has to conduct some high-risk military maneuver where we would land people from the 82nd Airborne or an Israeli commando unit into the site at Isfahan and try to find the uranium, go down hundreds of meters underground, retrieve the uranium and pull it out or perhaps destroy it on site. That is a high risk proposition.

What you’re left with is really the only other solution where we started: a negotiated deal. You have to get Iran’s agreement to secure that material, declare it, allow inspectors, and then either secure it under inspection or downblend it—the process in reverse, bring it down to a 3-percent or 4-percent level. That’s the only two solutions to this problem.

As of now, it’s hard to envision productive negotiations between the United States and Iran—especially since Trump launched this war while nuclear talks were still underway. And the new supreme leader is said to be more of a hardliner than his father was.

Cirincione believes that eventually there will be some sort of negotiations:

Almost all wars end by some sort of negotiation. If you project forward several weeks, it’s going to have to end. Usually there’s some sort of arrangement that’s made to end a war. With Donald Trump, who seems to be flying by the seat of his pants and making this up as it goes along, we just don’t know. But it’s possible that Trump has put us into the worst of all possible worlds. He’s made it impossible for us to have a negotiated solution to this. And we can’t use any military means to solve the problem. So we’re left in this worst of all worlds, which is Iran is holding all the nuclear cards at the end of this war.

So did Trump and his advisers not think hard before the war about what to do about this stockpile of HEU? There have so far been no indications that Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and whoever else was involved prepared for this part of the mess. “This may be the worst planned war in history,” Cirincione says. “I see no sign that they knew what they were doing. It seemed to be just literally bomb, bomb, bomb. There didn’t seem to be a plan for how you were going to get at that particular material. If there is one, it hasn’t emerged.”

He adds: “As you know, the members of the Senate and the House that have emerged from classified briefings on the war are appalled at the lack of planning, not just for what they were going to do when they started the war, what the goals were, but there seems to be no plan for how to end this war.”

That ending, whatever it may be, has to take into account this half-ton of uranium, which exists because the Iran deal was dumped. It is a crisis of Trump’s own making.

2026-03-12 19:30:00

This story was originally published by Vox and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

“We have to get used to the idea of eating insects.”

This proclamation came from, of all people, an insect researcher. Dutch entomologist Marcel Dicke pitched eating bugs in his 2010 TED talk as critical to sustainably feeding a growing human population, because insects have a much smaller carbon footprint than beef, pork, and chicken.

To make his point, he even featured photographs of what might be a common meal in this bold new future: a stir-fry with mealworm larvae, mushrooms, and snap peas, finished with a chocolate dessert topped with a large fried cricket.

Three years later, the United Nations published a comprehensive report that echoed many of Dicke’s ideas and argued that insects could be a more eco-friendly food source not just for humans, but also for livestock. The report received widespread media coverage and helped to trigger a wave of investment from venture capital firms and governments alike into insect farming startups across Europe, the US, Canada, and beyond, totaling some $2 billion.

There’s a ring of truth, it turns out, to the conspiracy theory that the globalist elites want us to eat bugs.

This money was pouring into insect agriculture at a time when investors and policymakers were hungry for new models to fix the conventional meat industry’s massive carbon footprint. And what’s more disruptive and novel than farming and eating bugs?

You personally might recoil at the thought of eating fried crickets or roasted mealworms, but many cultures around the world consume insects, either caught from the wild or farmed on a small scale. And while grubs don’t feature prominently in current paleo cookbooks, our paleolithic ancestors most certainly ate plenty of bugs.

But the past decade has shown that even if you build an insect farm, the global market may not come. Of the 20 or so largest insect farming startups, almost a quarter have gone belly up in recent years, including the very largest, Ÿnsect, which ceased operations in December.

All told, shuttered insect farming startups account for almost half of all investment into the industry. “Things have gone from bad to worse for the big insect factory business model,” one insect farming CEO said late last year in a YouTube video.

And Vox can exclusively report that plans to build a large insect farm in Nebraska—a joint project between Tyson Foods, America’s largest meat company, and Protix, now the world’s second largest insect farming company—are indefinitely on hold.

Beyond the financial woes of the insect farming industry, some philosophers worry about the ethical implications of potentially farming tens of trillions of bugs for food, as emerging research suggests insects may well have some form of consciousness and hold the capacity to feel pain and suffer.

“Evidence is building that there’s a form of sentience there in insects,” Jonathan Birch, a philosopher at the London School of Economics who leads the Foundations of Animal Sentience project at the university, told me last year.

But it looks like they may not have too much to worry about. In spite of the initial hype surrounding the bug farming boom, the insect agriculture industry has learned just how difficult it is to compete with the incumbent, larger animal-based meat industry—and that, perhaps, it never really made sense to try doing so with bugs.

Insect farming is similar to other types of animal farming. The insects reproduce, and the offspring are raised in large numbers in factory-style buildings. Many of the same welfare concerns for farmed chickens and pigs are present on insect farms, like disease, cannibalism, and painful slaughter. In the case of insects, the creatures are killed by a variety of means. They might be frozen, baked, roasted, shredded, grond, microwaved, boiled, or suffocated.

In 2020, insect companies farmed an estimated 1 trillion bugs, and the most commonly farmed species today are black soldier fly larvae, mealworms, and crickets.

While some people might tell researchers they’re open to adding bugs to their diet, these smallest of animals remain a novelty food in the US and Europe, as opposed to a commodity capable of displacing wings or burgers.

“The human food market, basically, has not materialized,” Dustin Crummett, a philosopher and executive director of The Insect Institute—a nonprofit that researches the environmental and animal welfare implications of large-scale insect agriculture—told me. “Only a tiny fraction of farmed insects are used for human food.”

But insect farming startups haven’t only sought to put insects on our plates or grind them into protein bars; many want to sell insect meal (ground up insects) as feed for other farmed animals. It’s a sustainable alternative, they argue, to the soy fed to factory-farmed chickens and cattle, much of which is grown on deforested land. Insect meal could also replace fishmeal (largely composed of small, wild-caught species, like anchovies and sardines), which is fed to farmed fish and heavily contributes to overfishing.

This approach of farming insects for livestock feed, however, isn’t materializing either, and much of it comes down to cost.

According to a 2024 analysis published in the journal Food and Humanity and co-authored by Crummett, the cost of insect meal is about 10 times that of soybean meal and 3.5 times that of fishmeal, a major cost gap that is unlikely to narrow anytime soon.

Insect meal is so expensive, in part, because feeding insects is expensive. Farmed insects are typically fed agricultural “co-products”—like wheat bran and corn gluten—most of which is already fed to livestock, and so insect farmers have wound up in competition with big meat companies to buy up these ingredients. This simple fact weakens the narrative often driven by insect farming startups that they are putting food scraps that otherwise would’ve been thrown away to good use.

“Organic waste from the industry becomes feed for insects,” Protix’s website reads. “This circular food production mirrors nature’s circle of life.” But this is misleading; Protix feeds its insects ingredients like oat husk and starch, which are typically used in traditional livestock feed anyway. “It doesn’t really make sense to buy chicken feed to feed insects to feed to chicken,” as one insect farming startup founder told AgriTech Insights a couple of years ago.

And it’s not guaranteed that insect meal will be more sustainable than soy or fishmeal. According to a UK government report, the environmental impact of insect farming depends on a number of factors, including what insects are fed and whether startups power their farms with fossil fuels or renewable energy.

Energy usage explains a lot of the industry’s cost challenge. Farmed insects require warm temperatures, and in Europe, where so many of the startups are based, energy prices have sharply risen in recent years.

To lower costs and develop new revenue streams, some insect farming startups have pivoted to become “waste management” companies, too. Rotting food waste in landfills is a huge source of global greenhouse gas emissions, and insect farming companies can earn money by taking it off other companies’ hands and letting bugs eat it.

But here, too, the industry has run into obstacles, including strict EU regulations around what can be fed to insects and an inconsistent product. When insects are fed food waste, their final nutritional profile can vary widely depending on what they’re fed, but livestock feed companies need nutritional consistency.

And it turns out that even the largest and most powerful companies in the space can run into hard, economic realities when trying to rear bugs on waste en masse.

In late 2023, America’s biggest meat company, Tyson Foods, announced it had invested an undisclosed sum of money in Protix, a large Dutch insect farming startup. That Tyson was putting its weight behind it seemed like much-needed proof that insects could be the future of food, as so many startups, investors, and researchers had claimed.

The two companies planned to build a massive insect farm together near Tyson’s cattle slaughterhouse in Dakota City, Nebraska. At the insect farm, Protix would raise and kill around 70,000 tons of larvae annually—what I estimate to be approximately 300 billion individual insects. The bugs would feed on cattle paunch, partially digested plant matter removed from the stomachs of cattle slaughtered at Tyson’s plant. After a few weeks of feeding on the animal waste, the larvae would be slaughtered and ground up into insect meal, destined to become food for pets and livestock.

It was a way for Tyson to “derive value” from its waste, as it told CNN.

Now, Vox can exclusively report that Tyson Foods has withdrawn its air permit application to build the plant, and the plant itself is “on hold indefinitely.” That’s according to email exchanges last December between Tyson Foods and the Nebraska Department of Water, Energy, and Environment, which were obtained through public records requests by the nonprofit Society for the Protection of Insects.

Tyson and Protix did not respond to questions for this story.

The companies’ stalled plans aren’t unique in the insect farming space.

In early 2024, Innovafeed—currently the largest insect farming startup—opened a pilot plant in Decatur, Illinois, in partnership with ADM, the massive food and livestock feed manufacturing company. The US Department of Agriculture awarded Innovafeed a $11.7 million grant to turn insect waste into fertilizer at the plant, but a year and a half after it opened, it suspended operations, citing funding challenges.

Through a public records request, Society for the Protection of Insects obtained over 600 pages of documents pertaining to the grant, though about half of it is redacted, including much of the environmental review and Innovafeed’s commercial records. Last week, the organization sued the USDA over the heavy redactions, arguing it’s in the public’s interest to fully disclose the details of the deal.

The USDA declined to comment on pending litigation, and Innovafeed did not respond to questions for this story.

The biggest blow to the industry yet came late last year when the largest startup of them all—France-based Ÿnsect, which had raised over $600 million, representing nearly a full third of the sector’s funding—ran out of money. And a quarter of that backing had come from the French government. A recent whistleblower investigation alleged severe mismanagement at Ÿnsect’s production facility that led to filthy conditions and health problems for workers. The company didn’t respond to a request for comment.

As insect farming startups struggle to stay afloat, their main trade group—the International Platform of Insects for Food and Feed (IPIFF)—is going so far as to call on the European Union to mandate publicly funded food services, like school cafeterias, to buy insect meat and publicly owned farms to buy insect meal to feed to their animals. IPIFF didn’t respond to an interview request for this story, nor did the North American Coalition for Insect Agriculture.

As for the outlook of the insect farming sector, more startups will probably go under in the years ahead, and for the survivors to continue on, they may need to leave Europe and North America for warmer climates and lower operating costs.

But the rise, fall, and resettling of the industry isn’t uncommon in the agricultural technology field, Crummett says. Vertical farming, for example, seemed like a great idea on paper, but it’s been an economic failure.

2026-03-12 06:55:50

A US aircraft carrier destroyed by Iranian missiles. American bombs leveling a nuclear power plant. The Burj Khalifa engulfed in fire.

None of it happened, but that didn’t stop people from spreading fake videos online.

In the days since Trump’s weekend strikes on Iran, AI-generated videos realistically depicting entirely fabricated events have been spreading like wildfire on X and other social media platforms. 

For years, X (formerly Twitter) was one of the most valuable tools for real-time information during breaking news events. But that era seems to be over. Since Elon Musk’s takeover of the company, the platform’s usefulness as a reliable news source has steadily eroded. Moderation has been gutted, the algorithm rewards engagement over accuracy, and resources funneled into their own, uniquely problematic AI platform: Grok.

We’ve seen political AI content creep into the platform before—like a fabricated video depicting Jake Paul at Iranian protests—but the recent strikes in Venezuela, and now Iran, have unleashed an onslaught of misleading AI video content.

The motivations behind the content vary. Some creators appear to be celebrating, using AI video to glorify Trump and Netanyahu’s military actions. Others seem aimed at manufacturing doubt about the war, undermining American public confidence, and muddying the information environment so badly that no one knows what’s real.

And in a disturbing sign of how deep the problem goes, Grok—X’s own built-in AI tool—has been misidentifying AI-generated content as real. (A spokesperson for X didn’t immediately address a request for comment, but shared links to recent posts by the firm’s safety team.)

Last month, Mother Jones’ Arianna Coghill spoke with AI content expert Jeremy Carrasco about exactly this kind of scenario. Carrasco finds the fake content concerning, but says the deeper harm is what this flood of AI content does to our relationship with real video. When fake footage is convincing and common enough, people start doubting everything—including authentic footage of things that actually happened. That’s the environment we’re now operating in.

Staying informed has never been more important, but in this moment, that means being particularly careful about what you accept as real—even if you think you see it with your own eyes.

2026-03-12 05:27:08

This article was produced in collaboration with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, which supports independent journalists as they forward fresh narratives about inequality. Subscribe to follow EHRP’s award-winning journalism, co-published with mainstream media outlets.

When we watch the news now, we often ask ourselves: what disaster movie is this? Is it the one where Americans are shot in their cars and on the street, where manicurists and gardeners are hauled off to torture prisons overseas, and where the commander-in-chief pronounces “affordability” like it’s some weird German word. But the inverse is true as well. As American reality has begun to feel like the Hollywood film Civil War, 2025’s Oscar-nominated movies almost all—for the first time in decades—reflect our insecure, tormented reality. But these films do more than echo the bare facts. While they’re about economic and social insecurity, authoritarianism and exploitation, they all represent those forces through the uncanny and surreal.

Take Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, a hyperreal, pulpy and sometimes dreamlike portrait of American political violence. In the film’s most memorable sequence, Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro) aids migrants as they escape the authorities in what he calls a “Latino Harriet Tubman situation:” his allies ride skateboards and jump from roof to roof as if they were samizdat chimney sweeps in Mary Poppins.

The radicals dubbed the French 75, who take on the film’s ICE-inflected police state, get quasi-Pynchonian, performative names like Teyana Taylor’s Perfidia Beverly Hills: their backstory is rendered in commensurately broad strokes, set against backdrops like a desert weed farm-slash-nunnery. As a daughter of Weather Underground members recently wrote in the New York Times, One Battle After Another’s resistance fighters are cartoons of the real McCoy, emanations of an improbable, fantastical style.

In Sinners, Jim Crow-era Black American musicians and entrepreneurs strive for independent spaces for love and commerce, and are robbed of their lives and livelihoods by an Irish vampire with potato famine vibes. Timeframes may meld wildly—the film’s central 1930s Mississippi juke joint dance number includes contemporary hip hop dancers and Cleopatra. Director Ryan Coogler has said that he intended the film as about how Black music, a “system of healing,” was extracted for profit. (It’s a happy paradox that a film so critical of exploitative and racist capitalism has grossed more than 370 million dollars.)

These films exemplify what I’ve called “hysterical surrealism,” a genre that fits our age of Trump, erratic state violence, and opulent overlords who treat our country like their private bunker.

Representing social insecurity and precarity in something like a magical realist fashion lets audiences more comfortably watch films that speak to their own anxieties as viewers. Surrealism emerged, after all, as an art genre that was both a reprieve from and reflection of the violent political situation of World War I. After all that grotesque slaughter, who could believe in conventional representational art anymore?

As surrealism partly relieved viewers of that unease—while also capturing new levels of brutality through unexpected symbols—so does the aesthetic of this new crop of films permit viewers to process the extreme social insecurity of our period by portraying aggression and loss in ways that feel detached from the everyday.

In the Brazilian-made Best Picture nominee The Secret Agent, set in that country’s authoritarian 1970s, a pungent sequence features an animated amputated leg, acting as a surreal “stand-in” for police state violence, harming citizens in the film as if it were a slasher. The leg refers to the perna cabeluda (hairy leg), a real-life urban legend from the city of Recife: a severed limb was reputed to hop around dark boulevards kicking people, a metaphor for the dictatorship.

A fourth Best Picture nominee, the sci-fi thriller Bugonia, is also stridently weird, obsessed with both close-ups of bees and the threat of a global conspiracy. So is Marty Supreme, ostensibly a 1950s period drama but with a hyperreal, dislocating aesthetic, full of contemporary-feeling dialogue and editing so rapid that it induces seasickness.

Timothée Chalamet as Marty is a tenement-dwelling, nervy capitalist in the making, hustling ping-pong tables and international table tennis competitions, but he’s also a hyperkinetic liar, careening through every layer of the American social structure: in one scene, he crashes through the floor of a hotel room while taking a bath, landing on a gangster. Marty’s status anxiety and empty ambition is represented, in another scene, by an extended shot of hundreds of ping-pong balls descending on a nighttime New York City street.

Beyond exposing viewers to a stylized and thus less paralyzing version of their fears, today’s gritty, surreal mode of filmmaking genuinely captures our moment. The wild uncertainty and cartoonish oppression of our current moment is best rendered in a weird and confrontational register. Charlie Kirk was shot by a kid who etched Discord memes on the bullets, and everyone saw the footage. DHS now routinely releases white supremacist supercuts of police violence that look like grist for Adam Curtis documentaries. We dwell, after all, in a weird and violent world where it seems that anything bad can happen and often does.

These films stand in contrast to the realist 1970s “social issue films,” the last time politically charged films dominated the typically all-too-conventional film award ceremonies. Those 1970s ancestors of today’s Oscar-lauded films, like Academy Award-winners Rocky and Norma Rae, or The King of Marvin Gardens, were schmaltzily realist and transparent in comparison. Rocky‘s working-class uneducated boxer is a debt collector struggling to get his piece of the American Dream during the economic crisis of the 1970s.

In 1974’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, widowed Alice, who dreams of life as a singer, becomes a waitress in the Southwest to support her child. In Blue Collar, made four years later, Detroit autoworkers including a brilliant Richard Pryor try to keep the faith when their jobs are dull and grim. These films emerged in a time when the postwar promise of working- and middle-class security and income growth started to fracture. (The Nixonian, uncanny political edge of the 1970s was, in contrast, represented in paranoiac—but still more or less realist—thrillers like The Parallax View.)

This year’s Oscar-nominated films about ambitious strivers, faded revolutionaries, and exploited workers, in contrast, are far from realistic. Their hysterical surrealism—a screwball, otherworldly style that seeks to represent inequality and authoritarianism through wacky B-movie elements, pastiche, and anachronism—has antecedents in Best Picture winner Bong Joon Ho’s at times surreal class-struggle film Parasite. All are defined by what the scholars Vinicius Mariano de Carvalho and John Schoneboom have dubbed “surrealpolitik,” an aesthetic expressing a world “increasingly shaped by irrationality, disruption, and the erosion of established norms.”

“Surrealpolitik,” in the words of de Carvalho, is what happens when both culture and politics resemble a “fantasy island: one with little room for rules…and little concern for logical coherence.” If surrealpolitik shapes this year’s Oscar fare, it’s partly because “realism”—surrealism’s opposite—is now so tenuous. AI and other visual tricks have made it hard for us to know what’s factual footage and if it is of an actual event. So little unedited footage gets to us. Meanwhile, every state and politician is a purveyor of some kind of “content,” often similarly distorted, but coming to us with the imprimatur of some supposedly respectable platform or other. Conventional realism, in this context, feels fake.

These films’ uncanny aesthetic gives the viewer some blessed distance from police state oppression or social class desperation, even when they mirror the prevailing tensions of our own reality. Call it Extractive Capitalism for Dummies.

This weekend, when tens of millions watch the Oscars, viewers will be seeing something different from what we’ve seen in decades: a competition between surreal and hyperreal films about societal and economic instability, for the first time in decades, if ever.

Sure, I’ll be tuning in to enjoy terrible canned banter and over-the-top production numbers, and to hope that someone finally rewards long-deserving Gen X patron saint Ethan Hawke. But I’ll also be waiting for a star or a filmmaker, after thanking their twenty agents, to suggest taxing the rich and that every billionaire is a policy failure, starting with those in the award’s show audience.

They will, after all, have the hugest stage in which to note that America has now become even sicklier and more surreal than the films that have been nominated. They could voice their own critique of the world their films reflect. It’s doubtful that they will, of course, but here’s hoping.

2026-03-12 03:14:34

The United States is responsible for killing at least 175 people, many of them children, in a Tomahawk missile strike on an Iranian elementary school on the last day of February, according to US officials and others familiar with the ongoing military investigation who spoke with the New York Times. The death toll was reported by Iranian officials. 

The deadly strike on the girls’ school, Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary, followed incorrect targeting intelligence about the area. The school is nearby buildings used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Navy—which the US also targeted on the same day it decimated Shajarah Tayyebeh. Before it was a school, the site was connected to the base. But, according to a visual analysis for the Times, the school area has been sectioned off from the base for at least a decade. US military intelligence, the preliminary report findings indicate, might have been operating off of old data.

The investigation isn’t over and more information is poised to come out about how the school became designated as a target. While there have reportedly been instances of the US using Claude, the AI model created by Anthropic, in their offensive against Iran, it is unclear if the AI was used in the strike against the school. Government officials told the Times that it may have been the result of human error. 

The Times’ sourcing requested anonymity due in part to the fact that President Donald Trump has suggested, without evidence, that Iran was responsible for the elementary school strike. 

Evidence was already mounting against the United States and their culpability for the strike. For example, the US was the one targeting the nearby Iranian base and its military is the only one involved in the conflict that uses Tomahawk missiles. 

Still, Trump on Saturday told reporters that, “In my opinion, based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran.”

On Monday, a Times reporter asked the president why he was why he was alone in his administration in blaming Iran. Top officials including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth have referred to the ongoing investigation when asked about the school strike. “Because,” Trump began, “I just don’t know enough about it.”

Images and videos circulating online of the decimated school and recently dug graves for the dead children illustrated the human cost of the strikes. 

One mother described the scene on that day in February to NBC News. She received a call from the school that the war had begun and she needed to pick up her child. She didn’t make it in time. Her son died in the strikes. 

“By the time we arrived, the entire school had collapsed on top of the children,” the mother, who asked not to be identified, told NBC News. “People were pulling out children’s arms and legs. People were pulling out severed heads.”

2026-03-12 02:35:20

Following the US-Israeli strikes on Iran beginning in late February, Iran has effectively halted all traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint in the Persian Gulf through which about 20 percent of global crude oil and natural gas flows. Many Americans are now experiencing the effects: skyrocketing gas prices. That’s not likely to change any time soon.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) shared his observations on social media Tuesday that the Trump administration had “no plan” on how to respond.

Did the Trump administration ever really have a plan? To try to answer that question, and its ramifications, I spoke with Jeff Colgan, a political science professor and Director of the Climate Solutions Lab the Watson Institute for Public and International Affairs at Brown University. He’s written extensively about the role of oil in international politics and war, and how it impacts energy and the environment.

What is the Strait of Hormuz? 

The Strait of Hormuz is the most important chokepoint in the world, particularly for oil and natural gas. So this is absolutely the nightmare scenario that many risk analysts have been worrying about for decades.

Although this region has seen a lot of warfare over the decades, the tanker flows [to transport crude oil] have managed to continue. Often, the combatants on both sides want the flow of oil to continue because at least one of the sides are profiting from it.

So this does put us in uncharted waters where the Strait of Hormuz gets bottled up in a modern context.

Why is the Strait of Hormuz bottled up right now?

Because the US attacked Iran and Iran has no viable counter strategy to strike back at the US. In some sense, this is an extreme step by Iran, but they feel like they have no other choice. Their leadership is wiped out, and they’re fighting for their lives. 

So in this war, unlike others, they are using their full capacity to lash out in every direction, including all of the US military bases that are located in the region—in Bahrain, UAE, and Qatar especially. Iran was also in a difficult “use it or lose it” situation with their missiles because the US bombing campaign was directed toward destroying missiles to make sure they couldn’t use them. 

Iran has long avoided closing the Strait of Hormuz because Iran’s own oil has flowed through it and they don’t want to cut off their only revenue source. But their backs are to the wall.

It seems like the Trump administration started the war in Iran without a plan for the Strait of Hormuz. What are your thoughts on the administration’s handling of the situation?

It is shocking and, frankly, appalling how little planning and foresight the White House has brought to the situation. The poor planning of the war appears to be on many issues, including many Americans who are in Gulf countries, munitions, etc. 

It’s striking because it seems like they have tried to walk back from the situation on Monday and say, “We’re going to wrap this war up quickly.”

How do you see the blockade on the Strait of Hormuz from a historical perspective? 

I have been writing for a couple months now about the Trump administration’s return to what I call “petro-imperialism”—the idea that the US, prior to 1973 would intervene in global oil markets in support of American oil companies and use force like the 1953 coup in Iran backed by the CIA when Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh nationalized oil. 

This happened in multiple countries: “We’re going to select your political leader, and if you don’t pick the right one, we’re going to get rid of them.” 

In Trump’s rhetoric, with regard to Venezuela, especially, but also with Iran, we see echoes of that.

What do you think is the immediate impact on oil and trade?

One thing we saw in the 1980s was the so-called Tanker War between Iran and Iraq. Tankers are resilient to being hit by missiles so it is possible to keep the flow of oil going during the war. But this warfare has changed. Drone technology [in Iran] is untested waters. 

It’s striking to see how even oil markets reacted very strongly on Monday, bringing the oil price way back down, because the president signaled that we wanted to keep the war from getting out of hand. But it’s not like oil markets always get it right either. 

There’s real uncertainty on how long it will take to restore the flow of oil when statements like the one today from Saudi Aramco [the national oil company of Saudi Arabia] saying that if the situation doesn’t stop very soon, the effects will be “catastrophic.” 

On Tuesday, Energy Secretary Chris Wright made an announcement on X that the US Navy escorted an oil tanker through the Strait of Hormuz. In response, oil prices plunged and stocks jumped. But shortly after, the post was deleted. Is this mixed messaging something you’ve come across before?

The fog of war is a problem for all wars, where you have misinformation and uncertainty. On the other hand, the Trump administration has far more inconsistency and incoherence than a typical US administration. There are probably multiple reasons why they are more incoherent, but we can observe how President Trump himself has said conflicting things about the war—that it’s pretty much complete and then demanding unconditional surrender in the next breath.

As someone trying to absorb everything going on in Iran, is there something key that you think we should understand?

We have choices about how we consume energy, and what isn’t spiking right now is the price of sunshine and wind. We should be thinking, as consumers, about the choices that [the U.S. government is] making and the energy security, economic security, and national security consequences. No energy source is perfect and there’s always trade-offs, but renewables have a significant national security advantage in situations like this, where the basic fuel source of fossil fuels can be interrupted by political events. It’s not only wars, but also embargoes, as we saw with Russia and Ukraine and the negotiations with Europe about various flows of fossil fuels. What kind of energy we consume does matter.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.