Greg Brew on Surging Energy and the 'Strategic Trap' of the War in Iran
Odd Lots
Bloomberg
4.5 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 20 March 2026
⏱️ 60 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The war in Iran has already lasted longer than many people might have expected. There was an initial assumption, after oil prices started surging, that President Trump could just declare victory at any moment. But that hasn't happened, and the longer this goes on, the more damage is being done to the region's energy infrastructure. Already a key gas plant in Qatar has been damaged so badly that it's expected to take it years to repair. On this episode, we speak with return guest Gregory Brew, a senior analyst at Eurasia Group who specializes in energy and Iran. Beyond his current work, Greg is the author of two books on the history of oil in Iran. We discuss the logic of the war from both the Iranian and American perspectives, and why the Trump administration may have walked into a "strategic trap" with no easy way to declare victory and get out.
Read more:
Iran Leaves an Isolated Trump Grappling With Historic Oil Crisis
How Iran Has Effectively Closed the Strait of Hormuz
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| 1:00.9 | Donald Trump is rewriting the Washington rulebook and reshaping the global economy. |
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| 1:13.1 | I'm Stephanie Flanders, head of government and economics at Bloomberg. |
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| 1:54.1 | And I'm Tracy Allaway. |
| 1:55.3 | Tracy, we're recording this the morning of March 19th, around 9 a.m. |
| 1:59.9 | And that's how you know it's bad when you have to throw in the hour and the minutes. 9.07 a.m. 9.7 a.m. And I think the story right now is just the degree to which people are realizing more and more energy infrastructure in the region. We're talking about the Iran War, of course. More and more energy infrastructure in the region. I mean, it's literally on fire. Yeah. The thing that I've noticed, having |
| 2:21.5 | recorded these sort of emergency podcasts over the past, I guess, two weeks now, is that we will |
| 2:27.7 | talk about a hypothetical, like, you know, oh, what happens if Iran strikes the port of |
| 2:33.3 | Salalah in Oman? And then a couple days later, it happens if Iran strikes the port of Solala in Oman? |
... |
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