00:00Oil and gas surging after Iran and Israel escalated attacks by targeting energy facilities.
00:05Qatar's Rastafan industrial city, which houses the world's largest LNG export plant,
00:11has suffered extensive damage.
00:14It comes after Israel attacked the key gas field southpars in Iran.
00:19President Trump has distanced himself from the Israeli attack,
00:22saying the U.S. knew nothing about it,
00:24and vowed to hold back his partner in the conflict from further attacks on the Iranian site.
00:30However, Trump also threatened to step in and destroy the energy facility should Tehran retaliate further.
00:36For more on this, we're joined by Stuart Livingstone-Wallace, our executive editor for MENA and Russia,
00:41and Laura Davison, our Washington deputy bureau chief.
00:44Stuart, I'm going to start with you.
00:46Yet another chapter seems to be opening up in this war with these strikes on upstream energy facilities now.
00:55Yeah, and that should be concerning, which is not to say that anything that's preceded it is not concerning.
01:00I mean, clearly, you know, in terms of the amount of strikes that have been going on on both sides
01:05of the Persian Gulf and beyond,
01:07you know, that is really of a very high level.
01:10But, you know, these have a more profound impact, I would say, certainly on the global economy,
01:15just in terms of how reliant the region is.
01:18Now, Hormuz is a big problem, but at least in theory, if you get some sort of ceasefire,
01:23you could reopen shipping there reasonably quickly, you would have thought.
01:27However, when you start damaging onshore and offshore and processing facilities within the energy industry,
01:33and that also would obviously include petrochemicals, that impact could potentially go on for many months.
01:38It would just depend on the extent of the damage and how long it takes to repair.
01:42So it is deeply concerning.
01:43And for Iran itself, it's deeply concerning.
01:45You know, if you think about what it does with its gas,
01:47it basically uses pretty much all of it for power generation domestically.
01:51And there was also knock-on effects, you know, within its neighbors.
01:54So you saw Iraq, for instance, say there was a drop in power generation as a consequence of this.
01:58So the ripple effects are profound and deeply concerning.
02:05Laura, I want to turn to you because a couple of hours ago,
02:09President Trump put up a post suggesting that the U.S. were not aware that Israel were going to target
02:15South Bars.
02:16But he also said no more attacks will be made by Israel.
02:20But then if Iran retaliated once again on Qatar, the U.S. would have to get involved.
02:26How should we read this post?
02:28Unpack it for us.
02:30Yeah, so this post really sort of reveals Trump's thinking and kind of the political predicament he finds himself in.
02:37This is essentially a de-escalatory post.
02:40He's looking to cool the temperatures after this sort of, you know, Iran and Israel trading these strikes on key
02:47energy sites.
02:48Sort of the bottom line here is Trump is not at all for energy sites being targets
02:53because he's worried about the price of oil and just thinks that, you know,
02:56those targeting LNG or oil fields will just continue to fuel those price spikes.
03:01But in this post, you kind of see him in real time gaming out geopolitically what's happening,
03:07or at least what he would like to happen.
03:08He says that the U.S. wasn't informed of these strikes by Israel in advance,
03:12sort of placing some blame on Israel there,
03:14but then goes also on to blame the Iranians for their attack on that LNG facility in Qatar,
03:20saying that that was unfair and unprovoked.
03:23He kind of is splitting the baby here a little bit, saying that, you know, Israel won't make future attacks.
03:28You know, it's not clear that he can control that because the U.S. wasn't aware of this first attack,
03:32but also saying that if Iran were to, you know, escalate things further, that the U.S. would hit back.
03:37So there's a lot of different players here, a lot of different chess pieces Trump is trying to move,
03:42but just indicates how out of control and out of Trump's control the situation has gotten.
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