The Iran War Cease-Fire and the Return of the Energy Weapon

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Every year, the Lionel Gelber Prize honors the world's best book on international affairs published in English. The prize is presented by the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. The 2026 winner is Francis J. Gavin for his examination of how history can help us understand and navigate the complex and confusing world around us. It's called Thinking Historically, A Guide to Statecraft and Strategy, published by Yale University Press. Gavin will deliver the 2026 Lionel Gelber Prize lecture on April 15th, 2026 and you can register to attend online. Visit gelber.munkschool.utoronto.ca for more details on the 2026 Lionel Gelber Prize.

**Ravi Agrawal** (1:02)
Hi, I'm Ravi Agrawal, Foreign Policy's Editor-in-Chief. This is FP Live.
So, I'm recording this episode on the morning of Wednesday, the 8th of April. On Tuesday evening, Iran and the United States announced a two-week ceasefire that was brokered by Pakistan. Already this morning, the ceasefire feels tenuous. But it's better than the alternative, which was a threat by US. President Donald Trump to wipe out Iran's civilization. We'll see where the coming days take us. My featured interview this week is about how Iran has used energy as a weapon over these past five weeks. Initially, an attack on Iran was framed as being about security, Israel's security, the region's security, even the world's security, especially if Iran got a nuclear bomb. But Iran's closure of the Strait of Hormuz and now it's de facto control of it made the narrative about energy. Why is energy being used as a weapon of war? I have a terrific guest who has long been making the case that none of this should be a surprise. That's coming up, but first I thought I'd share my read on things the morning after we learned about a ceasefire. As I said, it's shaky, it's tenuous, I'm hopeful, but I'm not bullish, and we still have so many questions. What was actually achieved? As I've argued before in FP and on this show, the facts don't look great for Trump. The Iranian regime is degraded but intact. Iran can still launch ballistic missiles and attack drones, and it's still in possession of 440 kilograms of highly enriched uranium. If the war's objectives were to prevent Iran from being in this position, then those objectives have failed. On top of that, Iran now seems to have de facto control of the Strait of Hormuz, the world's most consequential choke point for energy. With such a strong weapon of war, it may no longer even need to pursue a nuclear weapon. Each side is going to spend this ceasefire as a win. We should expect that. But as I've written in a new FP piece today, what's lingering in my mind is how the expert community predicted that Iran could turn into a quagmire. And in that sense, this is the opposite of the Iraq War. When Iran shut the Strait of Hormuz, Trump said, who knew they'd do that? Well, his own Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, told a Senate hearing that that was exactly the assessment of the entire intelligence community. Trump said nobody expected Iran to attack the Gulf states if it were provoked. Wrong again. Multiple former policymakers have told me this is exactly what was expected in war games. Experts sometimes get it wrong. You still need them in the room. You still need to empower them to speak up. And instead, as we know, Trump has long privileged loyalty over frankness. He's fired countless experts and career diplomats from the White House and the State Department. If you think about it, stumbling into an ill-conceived war shouldn't actually be a surprise. Perhaps Trump had a sense of security from how the Venezuela operation worked out, and how he was able to spin success in the media after that, and also after the 12-day war in Iran last June. But as the New York Times shows in a stunning piece of reporting this week, Trump's own cabinet members told him that he shouldn't believe Israel's claims about how easy it would be to win a war in Iran. The CIA's director said the idea of regime change was farcical. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called it bullshit. It's all in the reporting, and the leaks have begun. But it's clear that Trump just followed his gut on this one, and not the experts. I think that's an important finding to mull on this week. Because if the ceasefire is to hold, and if other US adversaries aren't to take advantage of Trump, he will need to at least start empowering US experts to speak up. For more, I've left a link to my essay on this, as well as the Times report I mentioned in the show notes. Okay, on to this week's interview, which we taped one day before the announcement of the ceasefire, but it holds up nicely. The world seems to have been lulled into a sense of security that more and more energy would be produced, and supply disruptions would be a thing of the past. But war is back, and energy is fair game in war, as the world has relearned after Iran held the Strait of Hormuz hostage. So how should countries really think about energy security? How does the clean energy transition play into this? Meghan O'Sullivan has been thinking about these questions for many years. She's a professor of International Affairs at Harvard University and runs the Belfer Center there. As you'll see in this conversation, she wears many relevant hats. She's an expert on the Middle East, drawing on her service in the Bush administration. She has direct experience on peace negotiations with her work on continuing issues in Northern Ireland. And she's an energy expert. As we know from her terrific book, Windfall, how the new energy abundance upends global politics and strengthens America's power. We'll have another episode this week on Iran again. But for now, let's dive in.