Bonus Episode: War on Iran and Australia's Response [S1-16]

Show Notes

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Music: Franz Schubert’s Piano Trio No. 2 in E-flat Major
Performed by Rudolf Serkin, Adolf Busch, and Hermann Busch

Transcript

William Sinclair
Welcome to a special edition of Why Can’t They Just, looking at politics, policy and getting stuff done. My name is William Sinclair and I’m a member of the Labor Party.

Janaline Oh
My name’s Janaline, I’m also a member of the Labor Party and a former diplomat, current environmental and anti-racism activist.

I would like to acknowledge that William and I are both recording this on the unceded lands of First Nations people in Australia. I’m on Ngunnawal land and I would like to pay my respects to their elders past and present, other people and families with close connections to this land and any First Nations listeners that we have today.

William Sinclair
We’re recording this on the 28th of March, 2026. We are about 3 weeks into the Iran crisis, where the Iranians have shut down the Strait of Hormuz, where about 20% of the world’s oil comes through, as well as fertilizers, helium, and a whole bunch of other raw materials. Janaline, do you just want to give a brief outline as to how we got here, where the world economy rests on this very, very important strait that the Iranians have now blocked.

Janaline Oh
Yeah, well, how we got to the point where so much of the world’s essential goods comes through the Strait of Hormulas is a very long and complex story. And honestly, I think it’s one of those things that happened organically through times when nobody really thought this was going to happen.

How we got here in a proximate sense in terms of how we got to the point where the US and Israel decided to bomb Iran and Iran retaliated by blocking effectively the Strait of Hormuz, I think is a kind of easier question to unpack at this point.

So the US was in a negotiation with Iran after the attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities by the US and Israel in August of 2025. And William, you and I did a podcast on that, and the legality, or otherwise, of those actions.

The U.S. was in negotiations with Iran over its nuclear ambitions. In the middle of those negotiations, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, persuaded Donald Trump, the President of the United States, that Iran’s capacity for developing nuclear weapons and, importantly, its imminent purchase of some Chinese missile carriers, which may have significantly increased its capacity to deliver any nuclear missiles, was of such an overwhelming and imminent threat that the US and Israel had to bomb Iran.

Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State at the time, said, ‘Oh, well, we had to do this because Israel was going to attack Iran and then Iran was going to attack us back and therefore we had to attack Iran first as a preemptive defensive strike’.

If you find that logic to be baffling, I share your confusion because that really makes no sense to me. In all of the war gaming that the US has done over several administrations, going back at least to the Obama administration, whenever the US has, or the US kind of military and intelligence establishment have done any kind of scenario planning on what would happen if you actually tried to shut down the Iranian nuclear programme by force, they have come up with a scenario that says Iran blocks the Strait of Hormuz, everything gets very ugly, Iran effectively holds the global economy hostage. And therefore, no US administration until this one has done that. And that includes the first Trump administration.

So the reason that the Obama administration in 2015 negotiated and concluded the Joint Comprehensive Partnership, otherwise known as the JCPOA or the Iran Nuclear Deal, under which Iran got some limited sanctions relief in exchange for very rigorous inspections of all of its nuclear facilities by the International Atomic Energy Agency, which reported to the UN Security Council and to the other parties of the JCPOA, which included all of the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, plus the European Union and Germany.

That deal was actually working. The IAEA said they had complete visibility of all of Iran’s nuclear supplies, all of its enrichment processes. They were very, very confident that they knew exactly what Iran was doing, where everything was, and what their plans were. Donald Trump came in, in his first administration, and blew up the deal. He basically said, ‘No, it’s a rubbish deal, don’t like it’.

I have to say, Netanyahu, from the beginning, has argued that the JCPOA was a rubbish deal. He has been urging the US to take military action against Iran for many, many years. The reason I think the Obama administration went for the diplomatic solution was because, as I said, they did the war gaming and discovered that Iran actually had the means to hold the global economy hostage to any hostilities from the US.

So under Trump 1, he blew up the deal. Iran then went off and started enriching more uranium, except this time not under any kind of supervision. And meanwhile, North Korea was developing its own nuclear weapon. So I think Iran probably learned from that, you know, ‘we should probably start enriching to the point where we can actually have a nuclear weapon in the future’.

So in August this year, as we noted in our podcast, the US and Israel bombed a number of Iranian nuclear facilities at that stage. Donald Trump said, ‘we’ve smashed Iran’s nuclear facilities, we’ve obliterated it, total victory. They’re never going to be able to do any kind of nuclear activity ever again because we’ve destroyed it’.

So it seems very contradictory, to say the least, to then come up in February and say, ‘Oh, we have to bomb Iran because they are about to get a nuclear weapon, even though a few months ago we claimed to have obliterated all of its nuclear capacity’.

I suspect what happened is over our summer, there were a lot of really serious protests in Iran. There was a huge amount of civil unrest because of the economic situation. The regime was very, very much on the back foot, it was looking very weak, very precarious. There were a lot of calls for the overthrow of the regime. Those protests eventually were met with absolutely brutal repression. There are estimates that potentially up to 30,000 people were killed by their own government and its security forces. So pretty awful.

I suspect the Netanyahu government, saw an opportunity where the Iranian leadership looked very weak and they thought, well, if we strike now, we can actually cut the head off the snake. And, you know, deal with Iran as a security threat to Israel once and for all.

Now, there is no question that Iran has been a security threat to Israel for a very, very long time. For the last 40 years, they have been calling for the eradication of Israel and, you know, some members of the Iranian leadership have called for the eradication of all Jews. They have funded Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis in Yemen. They’ve stoked and encouraged civil war in Lebanon, Yemen and Syria. So, you know, this is not a nice regime. They were a security threat, but there was nothing about February that made them more unusually threatening than they had been before.

Netanyahu saw an opportunity with a weak leadership and persuaded Donald Trump to go along with it.

William Sinclair
Up till now, I was always doubtful of my idea that Donald Trump is an idiot. Like, there was always this idea that maybe Donald Trump is playing 4D chess and the rest of us are playing checkers. And he’s just, you know, these sort of random moves are actually kind of brilliant.

And I guess now I’m kind of coming to the conclusion, no, to say nothing about his moral values or anything like that, the man’s an idiot that doesn’t really know what he’s doing and he’s in way out of his depth and he did not foresee things blowing up the way they have, even though I’m sure the people advising him probably tried to let him know that there were minefields in the direction that he wanted to go in. I guess this has changed my thinking about Donald Trump, that he’s actually not that smart.

Janaline Oh
Yeah, it’s interesting because there is always a sneaking suspicion, right? Maybe he really is, you know, the 4D chess player. I think part of the problem and the difference between the current administration and Trump 1 is that he’s actually got rid of all the advisors who are going to tell him otherwise. He has purged all of the so-called grown-ups in the room who were presenting to him because under Trump one, they did war game this, right? They did do the scenario planning. And guess what? They found that Iran was highly likely to block the Straits of Hormuz and hold the global economy hostage. And that’s why they said to him, don’t bomb Iran. Don’t start a war in Iran.

I think a couple of things happened in this administration. One is, as I said, he got rid of all the people who were going to tell him, no, don’t do this. Secondly, he just had an incredibly successful little exercise in Venezuela. And you and I did a podcast on that as well, where he went in, he took away Maduro, it was all very clean. A few people were killed, but not a large number. You know, it was a clean surgical strike, and then it turns out he had been talking to Delcy Rodriguez, the vice president, who had basically offered up Maduro as, you know, the sacrifice for a more pliant Venezuelan regime. And that’s what he’s got now. He’s got a Venezuelan regime which is basically willing to do what he wants. And he is thinking, wow, I’m pretty clever because I did this. And hey, look, there is an Iranian regime, which is also very weak, you know, on the back foot, very deeply, deeply unpopular, has just suffered popular uprisings, I can do the same thing.

And that failed. And it failed because Iran is not Venezuela. It failed because the Iranian regime was not the Venezuelan regime. The Iranian, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the IRGC, which is essentially the kind of militarized arm of the regime - so this is separate from the Iranian army, it’s more like a kind of paramilitary force that responds directly to the leadership. They are deeply, deeply entrenched throughout the society. They run very large parts of the economy.

And also they are deeply, deeply complicit in all of the crimes of the Iranian leadership. So they’re the ones who killed those 30,000 people. So they are aware that if the Ayatollahs are toppled and there is some sort of new pliant regime, in place, if the people have any say at all in this, they are probably dead. And when I say dead, I am not talking metaphorically. I am talking physically and literally.

So they have no incentive to do anything but fight to the absolute bitter end. They have already shown that their tolerance for pain inflicted on their own population is extraordinarily high. So from their point of view, victory means survival.

In two ways, victory means survival because if they don’t win, they die. But it also defines what victory is for them. They know exactly what they need to count as a win, and that is to survive.

Donald Trump has no idea what his success conditions are, and this has been very, very clear in the way that he has absolutely failed to articulate at any point what his actual objectives are.

William Sinclair
I guess my next question is how long do you think this is going to last, whether Strait of Hormuz is going to stay shut down? Because if I’m thinking about this from the Iranians’ point of view, this is a great situation. They’ve got a huge justification to shut down this strait because their country was attacked. They can now charge a fee for any ships crossing the Strait of Hormuz or just block ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz. The US is now in a desperate situation where they have to lift sanctions on Russian oil because they need the oil so badly. And actually, the US is lifting sanctions on, ironically enough, Iranian oil as well. This is a great outcome.

Why would the Iranians want this situation to go away? They wouldn’t want this situation to go away. Obviously, the Russians are going to get a huge amount of money flowing in with their sanctions lifted to help them with the war against Ukraine. So the Russians probably wouldn’t want them to enter into any sort of negotiation. And all the other times Iran’s entered into negotiations, they keep on getting blown up either by the US or Israel.

So it seems like there is no possible way that Trump is going to run away with some kind of agreement with the Iranians anytime soon.

Janaline Oh
Yeah, I have to completely agree with that analysis. Look, when I say this is a great outcome for the Iranian regime, I mean, they killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on the first day. They have killed a large number of the senior leadership of Iran. Ironically, it is highly likely that they killed the people who were most willing to negotiate and who were most willing to find a diplomatic solution.

By cutting off the head of the snake, it turns out it’s not a snake, it’s a hydra, and it’s now grown another nine heads. And all of those nine heads are more hostile, more hardline, more ruthless, and more willing to inflict violence and pain, including on their own population.

Which comes to your point. From Iran’s point of view, they are now in a position where they can make a huge amount of money charging basically protection money to ships going through the Straits of Hormuz. This could be a very, very significant revenue earner for them. They have, you know, the US has now lifted sanctions on Iranian oil. Like, this is absurd. And then as you say, Russian oil. I mean, it is so self-defeating to all of the US stated foreign policy aims in a whole lot of different areas. It is really quite breathtaking. And I think that the problem that Trump is finding, and you can see this in the way that he is trying to pretend that Iran is desperate for a deal. Iran is clearly not desperate for a deal. Look at their behavior. Are they behaving as though they’re desperate for a deal? Not so much. Who is behaving like they’re desperate for a deal? Oh, that might be Donald Trump because he realises that US petrol prices are going through the roof, he is already deeply unpopular and this war is even more unpopular.

So I think, as you say, the stupidity of taking this action is thinking that he could control events. So a year ago, and it seems ridiculous to think that it is actually only just over a year since this, like, incredibly chaotic presidency started, right?

So a year ago, he introduced the Trump tariffs, sweeping excessive tariffs on all sorts of countries. The markets freaked out, as of course they would, because, you know, it was a massive blow to the global economy. And he turned them off, for he turned part of them off, or he negotiated deals. And This is where we come with the ‘Trump always chickens out’, the TACO trade.

But he could control that. He was the one who could decide what the tariffs are going to be. Yes, he introduced a massive amount of uncertainty into the global economy. He alienated a lot of US trading partners and allies, but you know, he got a few international leaders to come and as he put it, kiss his arse in the White House and that made him happy.

The problem with this play is that now that he’s started, Iran actually gets to decide whether it ends or not. Donald Trump cannot just turn it off. He can stop bombing. He can pull back the US military. He can probably, to a lesser extent, even get the Israelis to pull back on their military activity. But he can’t stop the Iranians from bottling up the Straits of Hormuz. He can’t stop the Iranians from charging protection money from commercial shipping going through. He can’t stop the Iranians from effectively holding the global economy hostage. So what are his options? There are no good options.

William Sinclair
I guess the counterpoint to that might be the American military is massively, massively strong. It spends more on its military than like the next 5 or 10 countries put together. The United States has 11 of the world’s 20 aircraft carriers. Why can’t America just go in with their 11 aircraft carriers and just bomb that country to absolute pieces from one side to the other, or start some kind of ground campaign. Why can’t America just go in and blast Iran to pieces and open up the Strait of Hormuz that way?

Janaline Oh
Well, because it’s not as easy to blast a country to pieces as Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth, his secretary for war, seem to believe. And I think they are finding this now, that they are blasting with their incredible air power, and they’re not getting the result they won’t, because Iran, it turns out, is quite a large country. It doesn’t have anything like the military capacity of the US and Israel, but what it has learned and what Ukraine learned and what undoubtedly, you know, China and Russia and North Korea are learning, is that with a few cheap drones, you can basically deplete very sophisticated and expensive anti-missile systems. So with a $10,000 drone, Iran can go and threaten some US interest, military base, ship, you know, ally, whatever.

The US can absolutely 100% stop that drone, but they’re using a multi tens of millions of dollars worth of missile defence to stop that $10,000 drone. Iran can keep making these $10,000 drones and keep lobbying them. And at some point, these incredibly expensive missile defence systems are not gonna be able to stop them because they are depleted and because it costs so much to resupply them.

And guess what? A very significant component of ammunition in all of these military systems are chemicals like sulphur and helium. And guess what? They’re coming through the Straits of Hormuz. So the global military industrial complex is now actually starting to run out of supplies in the way that, you know, farmers and factories around the world are starting to run out of fuel. So, I don’t know how long they can keep this up, actually. They are depleting their reserves at an incredible rate. I saw a media report today suggesting that the US has expended a higher value of ammunition and military assets in the last four weeks than they did in, you know, four years in Iraq. So, like, they’re running down their own stocks.

Iran is also running down its stocks. It is also in a militarily very, very weak position. However, it is chucking really, really cheap, crappy stuff that can’t take out a US aircraft carrier, but can terrorise a lot of civilian commercial shipping, and do damage to actual civilians on the ground in places like Israel or the Gulf states, and the defence systems that are required to stop these things are disproportionately, insanely, asymmetrically expensive.

So who has the upper hand here in a military sense? It’s really hard to say. This is a classic kind of asymmetrical warfare situation, right? This is like the Viet Cong, you know, guerillas in the mountains hiding in the jungle, basically winning a war against the entire might of the US Army and Air Force.

Now, the US and Israel could send in ground troops. Absolutely. Where are they going to land? If they land on that coast near the Straits of Hormuz, Iran has been very, very clear that they’re just going to bomb them. They are quite happy to lay waste to large tracks of their own territory in order to bomb and destroy US armed forces. And it’s not like they can surprise them at this point, right? They know they’re coming.

William Sinclair
So just to back up with Israel and southern Lebanon, after the killing of Ayatollah Khamenei, the Iranians responded and Hezbollah, which is the Iranian backed militia group in southern Lebanon, also responded by launching missiles at Israel and Israel has responded by invading southern Lebanon.

And there are some members of the Israeli government who call on the military to take all the territory up to, to take all the territory up to the Litani River, and that will be the new border with Lebanon. So what do you think of that plan?

Janaline Oh
Yeah, I think it’s a terrible plan. It’s a terrible plan because firstly, it is a blatant act of aggression under international law if they were to do what those ministers are calling for. So the official line from the Israeli government is that they are not doing that. The official line from the Israeli government is that they are clearing the area of Hezbollah, and the reason for that is defensive because they want to ensure that those villages in northern Israel are safe.

Now we can have a conversation about proportionality because an important component of the laws of armed conflict is that the actions that you take in pursuit of a military objective are proportionate to securing that objective. In other words, minimise the amount of pain for civilians and non-military targets.

That aside, you know, the Lebanese government has finally taken action against Hezbollah, so surely, if you were in a world where you respected Lebanese sovereignty, you would be working with the Lebanese government to manage the threat from Hezbollah. You would not be invading large parts of southern Lebanon and effectively saying you’re going to redraw the borders. That is what I would say about it.

William Sinclair
I mean, in a sense, once again, I think this is almost a slight victory for Hezbollah. Hezbollah came into existence when Israel invaded southern Lebanon, and they started out as an insurgency and a resistance group trying to throw out the Israeli occupiers. And then eventually they were successful in that. And then after their success, they were both enormously popular, but they sort of lost their raison d’etre in terms of being a force designed to liberate the country from Israeli occupiers.

Now they’re in a situation where Lebanon is going to go back to being occupied. This might be a good thing for Hezbollah. It might increase their recruiting, might increase their popularity in the country. It might, it might bring back their raison d’etre, if you will. And as you say, it would have been smarter for Israel to work with the Lebanese government to throw out Hezbollah as a joint team. And as it stands now, it looks like this might, they might be throwing Hezbollah a lifeline.

Janaline Oh
Yeah, I know. Ironic, isn’t it?

William Sinclair
Be that as it may, I guess our episode’s focusing on Iran, I suppose Iran and the broader Middle East conflict, and particularly Australia’s involvement. Coming around to Australia, Albanese appears to be doing this kind of waggle dance with the US of trying to be as compliant as possible to the US interests without getting Australia involved in opening up the strait. And Anthony Albanese is doing, I guess you could say, a fair bit of dodging his way around Trump’s demands and saying, Oh, we did everything the US asked of us and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What do you make of Albanese’s response to this crisis, and do you think there’s anything else he should be doing differently?

Janaline Oh
When the US and Israel made their first attack on Iran. I wish that Albanese and Penny Wong and Richard Marles had not, within hours of that attack, gone in and effectively endorsed it. I would have preferred Albanese and Penny Wong and Richard Marles to have just said nothing for 24 hours while everybody else reacted, and then potentially come in in the way that many of the Europeans did. So not necessarily as Spain did. So Spain came out and just denounced it and said it’s illegal and it’s bad.

I don’t think that would have been in Australia’s national interest because Donald Trump is a vindictive person and there is nothing to be gained by saying that. Saying that is not going to change the behaviour of the US and Israel. Saying it might, however, bring retaliation unnecessarily on Australians through trade measures or whatever.

So that is a thing that I wish they did differently. Other than that, I think they have actually been quite measured and quite reasonable.

Sending the Wedgetail surveillance aircraft to the UAE at the UAE’s request for defensive purposes in the UAE was a reasonable thing to do. And the UN Security Council also passed a resolution condemning Iran’s attacks on the Gulf states and effectively endorsing defensive action against Iranian attacks on the Gulf states.

So I think in that respect, the government has been quite reasonable. They have signed on to a statement by a number of other countries saying that they will act to try to reopen the Straits of Hormuz and to try to find a resolution to this crisis. The other signatories of that, as well as the Albanese government, have made very clear their view that a diplomatic solution is their principal preferred tool for achieving that resolution.

They have not, they have deliberately stayed away from promising any kind of military solution. This is really significant, right? I mean, as we said in a previous podcast episode, on similar issues, Australia has followed the US into every single armed conflict the US has engaged in since World War II. So Australia not being part of this is actually quite a big deal. It is quite a big, very loud articulation of Australia’s independence in foreign policy.

So I think to all those people who say, ‘Oh, Australia is going to do whatever the US says’. I mean, clearly they haven’t.

William Sinclair
I’m just going to, I’m actually going to push back on the wedge-tailed surveillance aircraft. My understanding is that the Iranian Shahed drones managed to blow up some radio towers in the Gulf states. And what the wedge-tailed aircraft does is it kind of is a replacement to sort of spot Iranian missiles and drones going in to blow up Gulf infrastructure as a kind of a replacement. I suppose my opposition to that plan is, it means that we are involved in this conflict, at least the Iranians would see us as involved in this conflict, if we’re providing surveillance aircraft to protect infrastructure which the US and friends may use to attack Israel, then that means that we are kind of involved and Australia’s downplaying how involved we are, possibly for domestic audience purposes.

Janaline Oh
Yeah, I, I don’t buy that at all. I don’t think Iran cares what Australia’s doing.

Iran, let’s also remember, has actively planned and actually carried out violent acts of terrorism on Australian soil recently.

Now, having said that, I think the fact that Australia has been very, very scrupulous about what this aircraft is doing, what purpose it is, there for, and whom it is trying to defend, means that it is not.

I mean, to say that, ‘oh, well, Iran is attacking these things because Israel and the US are attacking Iran and therefore protecting these things means that we’re kind of involved on the side of the US and Israel’, I think is a very long bow. If we were going to be engaged on the side of the US and Israel, we would be doing what John Howard did in Iraq, right? We would be actually going in there trying to reopen the Straits of Hormuz. We are not doing that. We have explicitly said we don’t want to do that.

So I think doing what Australia is currently doing with respect to the UAE, and specifically in response to a request from the UAE to do a thing that has been endorsed by the UN Security Council, as in, defend the Gulf States, who are third parties to this conflict, from Iranian attacks, I think is quite different from being involved in the principal hostilities. So I actually think this is a reasonable thing for the Australian government to do.

I mean, you know, you can have a debate about whether the UAE is a great ally of Australia, right? They’ve done some nice things to our travellers. They’ve also been involved in some pretty awful human rights abuses, both within the UAE and also in terms of their sponsorship of certain unsavoury militias in places like Sudan. But I think on the face of it and in terms of the current bilateral relationship and in terms of the endorsement by the UN Security Council, I am comfortable with that extent of Australian involvement in terms of its legality.

William Sinclair
So the Strait of Hormuz, the Strait of Hormuz crisis has revealed how fragile Australia’s energy system is. I mean, basically we rely on energy that we import for elsewhere which is a problem because that means that Australia’s energy is dependent, Australian energy for farming, for people, you know, driving in their cars. All this energy is dependent on a very fragile geopolitical situation which can change. So Australia has some of the lowest energy reserves in proportion to the population in the world, I think we’ve only got enough energy for like 20 days or some trivial amount.

What should Australia do now that we’ve sort of been caught with our pants down, being dependent on a very fragile geopolitical situation that is now different?

Janaline Oh
So at the risk of spouting government talking points, it’s about 30 days of fuel. Australia’s fuel mainly comes from Singapore and Malaysia. Having said that, that’s the refined fuel. The raw material that goes into those refineries does come for the Middle East, so we are still vulnerable to that.

I think the biggest argument that the government has in terms of what it’s already done without, you know, thinking about this crisis because we didn’t predict it, is really accelerate the shift to renewable energy. One of the reasons that we are not in a worse situation than we would have been is because, while we are very dependent on imported fuel for transport and industrial input, at least our electricity system is now more than 50% reliant on sun and wind, which is a much better source of supply. So I would say that the current situation really, really throws into very sharp relief the need for us to electrify our transport and to decarbonize our industrial processes so that we are not so reliant on imported fossil fuels and so that we can actually rely a lot more on locally generated renewable energy.

Now, people have argued, and I think the Japanese Prime Minister recently said, ‘Oh, you know, I don’t like the idea of being dependent on China for solar panels and wind turbines’. And I get that concern.

But I would also say to her, if I had the opportunity, you only need to import those solar panels and wind turbines once. And then if you can build local capacity for recycling and to service those bits of infrastructure, then that’s it. You’re not reliant on imports anymore, whereas with fuel, you are constantly reliant on a stream of imported fuel, and that is very vulnerable, obviously, to geopolitical risk.

So I think in terms of if you look at this crisis and you look at what should the Australian government be doing, I think it should be staying as far away from the conflict as possible. I also think it should be working very, very hard with like-minded countries that want to resolve this crisis by diplomatic means, bearing in mind that clearly none of these other countries has any influence over the three protagonists in this particular conflict. So nothing that Australia says is going to change the behaviour of the US, Israel or Iran.

Having said that, we also really, really, really need to be looking very hard at our domestic policy measures, firstly to protect our own people from the terrible economic consequences. I mean, one of the really awful things about this conflict is that it is demonstrating the extent to which Donald Trump can basically screw the entire world and the whole global economy, and we can’t do anything about it. And in this case, he has done it in a way that he can’t easily pull back from.

So I don’t know what the resolution is. I hope that the Australian government continues to work with the Europeans, with Latin Americans, with India, with China, to look at ways of creating the off-ramps that will lead to some kind of resolution that will enable the global economy to start the process of recovery.

Because the other thing is, as we said in a previous episode about the destruction of US soft power, destruction is asymmetric. You can destroy a thing very quickly and it takes years to rebuild it again. So even if hostility stopped today, I think it will take months and possibly years for the global economy to recover. Now, obviously, the faster hostilities stop, the quicker that recovery can begin and the quicker, you know, the better it will be because the damage will be less severe. I don’t see an easy resolution. I don’t see a quick resolution and that is a very depressing thing. So I hope that, you know, the rest of the world can help to ease the protagonists onto their off-ramps.

But regardless of how this is resolved at this stage, the Middle East is going to be less stable than it was before this started. The Iranian regime is going to be more intransigent and more difficult to deal with, the Iranian people are going to suffer more. The people of Lebanon, Israel, the Palestinian territories and all over the Gulf are going to suffer more than they would have had this not started. So it’s a pretty dire situation, I think. I wish I could think of something more cheery to end on.

William Sinclair
I guess my final question is the price of oil is about sort of hovering around $100 a barrel right now. And if you’ll indulge me bringing out the finance bro within, if you were an oil trader, would you be long or short? Do you think the price of oil is going to rise in the short term or fall?

Janaline Oh
Oh, I can’t tell. I’m not a finance bro. But I do think that at the moment, the price of oil is jumping around as the markets respond to statements by the US president. At some point, it is going to become apparent that there are billions of barrels of oil that are either not being produced or not being shipped and the markets cannot just wish those barrels of oil into existence.

The good scenario would be everybody massively piles into renewable energy solutions. And the sales of electric vehicles in Australia have gone through the roof in the last four weeks to nobody’s astonishment. I think it will speed decarbonization in the way that the first oil shock really sped energy efficiency.

Having said that, if you take the laws of supply and demand and you take into account that there are billions of barrels of oil that won’t exist in a few weeks compared to what would have existed had this conflict not happened, then I can only see one direction for the price of oil.

Given this situation, I think this is a perfect opportunity for Australia to make sure that our policies are very firmly geared towards promoting decarbonisation and towards accelerating decarbonisation. I think this is a really good opportunity for the government to look at all of that to address those issues in a way that improves equality, improves opportunity, and accelerates decarbonization.

They’re not going to be able to stop inflation from rising. They’re not going to be able to stop economic growth from slowing. They cannot control the bad effects from this global crisis on the Australian economy. But what they can do is take domestic measures to help to cushion that blow, to help to set us up in a good way for the future. And also to reduce the kind of inequality that is so corrosive in a democracy, because I think people are much more willing to suck up hardship and difficulty, particularly when it’s generated overseas, if there is a feeling of solidarity. In other words, if they feel that everybody is going through the same thing and that means addressing those key issues around inequality that you and I have already discussed.

William Sinclair
All right, that was this week’s episode of Why Can’t They Just? If you’d like to send us a question or a comment, please e-mail at us at whycan'ttheyjust@gmail.com, no apostrophe.

Janaline Oh
My name’s Janaline Oh, and this is Why Can’t They Just?