My favourite thing is to take the oil in Iran, but some stupid people back in the US say,

why are you doing that? But they're stupid people. So said President Trump just a few days ago,

and you will note that I resisted lapsing into my Trump impression. Oil, who has it, how it flows

and how it's transported, from where and to whom, has been one of the

most pressing questions of the American War on Iran. Daily fluctuations in the oil price

grab as many headlines as missile salvos. The Strait of Hormuz, the narrow choke point through

which oil tankers make their way from the Indian Ocean to the Persian Gulf remains closed,

or at least subject to Iranian discretion. Western politicians start to sweat at the thought

of a long-term effect on energy availability and price and the popular fury that would surely

follow a spike. Trump's motives are always hard to understand, like many people, I suspect that

he's found himself in over his head, committed to a war that he doesn't know how to end easily,

facing the prospect of a humiliating defeat over control of the strait, and prone to capricious

actions with disastrous international consequences. Well, that bit's not new. As has often been the case over the

past few years, it's as if you can hear the shudder and the smash of the world order changing

around us. Is it about oil? That, of course, was something anti-war protesters used to say a lot

during the Bush war in Iraq. Certainly Trump's foreign interventions often seem to have an oil imperialist

dimension to them, but is it just inevitable that oil pulls in all of these questions,

geopolitics and logistics, finance, the lifestyles powered by oil, yours and mine, and the consent

or otherwise we give to politicians who want to change our reliance on it.

You're listening to On Politics on the LLB podcast, and I am James Butler, and I am joined in the studio by a guest familiar to many listeners to the LRB's podcast project, Helen Thompson, Professor of Political Economy, at the University of Cambridge, whose last two books, Disorder and Oil and the Western

Economic Crisis, asked just those questions about the relationship between oil, energy and politics.

Helen, welcome. Pleasure to be here, James. I want to start just with where we are at the moment

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