Thanks.

Rules are the rules.

Yeah.

I was a negotiator, as John said before, under the Biden administration for a U.S.-Saudi civil nuclear power agreement, including establishing what we called at the time a black box enrichment facility, meaning a U.S.-owned facility on Saudi territory.

And by the end of 2024, we were basically at an agreement.

We had negotiated with the Saudis almost all the conditions in the collaboration.

I was leading it, but in the collaboration with the Department of Energy, our labs, the intelligence community, the Department of Defense, the Department of State, and with the authorization of the president.

This is one of the few areas where we've agreed with the Chinese and Russians for a long, long time that it was not a good idea to spread enrichment and reprocessing technology to additional countries.

Well, that's not, though, to that point, though-

And then they did 170 million.

So you know, look, I, I, I get that, uh, I, I don't look at, that's politics.

I didn't take their criticism seriously then, and therefore I understand what they're doing now.

I'm not for a softer version of a ban.

I'm not for a ban.

I think it's a bad idea because it also goes to the trust in the US economy, uh, a- and for our consumers around the world that will seek to understand how do they live, uh, without relying on the United States, and, and that's, that's damaging.

Right

Mm-hmm.

And so you had a, a disagreement there.

Now he is faced with this.

Basically, his military leaders are saying, what we're doing with these nightly strikes is, has diminishing returns.

There's a certain point where it's not working anymore.

It doesn't do very much.

And in fact, Iran is now attacking us in pretty harsh, uh, strikes in Jordan and in other places.

Ask permission before any of this ship could go through the strait?

It, it seems like a, a legitimate claim from the Ukrainian president.

Look, we know from my previous years in the White House and, and since, Russia's had a very strong defense, uh, ties with Iran.

That has been going on for a while.

Iran was manufacturing the killer drones that Russia was using in the war against Ukraine to kill Ukrainian civilians.

So it is not surprising at all.

Russia is not a friend of the United States, and this war is good for Russia because while they're taking a beating on the war front in Ukraine, oil prices going from 50 to 100, it's the only good thing that Putin has is raising the prices, and America's distracted.

The president is distracted.

Right.

Mm-hmm

... uh, crossing, and Yanbu, which is the area in Saudi Arabia where they load the ships, then you've taken the alternatives.

So now you've taken millions of barrels that have been able to make them- themselves onto the market are now gone, because that route.

And two ships turned around and made a U-turn, turned around, and now the...

Even if they do go through, the risk premiums are high, so the insurance rates go up.

If we're gonna go 10 ships a day, we're now down to two, 'cause everybody's a little bit sluggish.

Who pays the price for all of these things? Ultimately, the consumer, because we can't get oil out, we can't get gasoline out or diesel.

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve

Yeah

...

I came into the administration as the president's senior advisor on energy, both domestic and global.

Uh, and that started getting to a serious issue on the Russia-Ukraine war before the October 7th.

I say that because we're actually starting to see, uh, and we're gonna see more and more of it, an interconnection between what's happening on the ground in Russia-Ukraine, and what's happening in the Gulf.

The diesel price that you've just cited has to do, is the first piece that has to do as much with Russia-Ukraine as it does with the Gulf, and the interconnection between the two is what's leading us to this very big spike in diesel, which the reason it's such a big issue is because it's the price of diesel is outpacing the price of oil.

So oil is not, price of oil is actually not high enough to justify this $5.

What's, what's, what's your view?

We know the deal historically about the US protection in return for the free flow of resources, but are, are countries such as Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia now reevaluating the worth of that relationship with the US when it has cost them so dearly economically?

I think it's a great question, but h- here's where I think we are.

On NATO, the issue, uh, that p- as I think you've been reporting today, uh, the US coming in with a very heavy hand on the review and, and, uh, forcing, uh, the NATO Secretary General to, to be an employee of the United States and doing, uh, some kind of review.

On the fundamentals on NATO, look, I worked for President Biden.

I went to the NATO Summits.

President Biden used to chide the Europeans in the s- you know, on the same issue, that there was not enough, uh, burden-sharing, as he would refer to it.

Uh, and he was prodding, and, and by, b- compare between 2021 and 2024, many countries reached the 2%, and Trump is now pushing that even further.

Do you think this has dented some of the ardor a- among some of the foreign policy hawks for more US aggression o- on an international stage? Or actually is it now going to draw back the US because of what has been a sobering lesson in the conflict with Iran?

What's your reaction been to how this has played out over the last week?

Well, quite remarkable, uh, because the MOU in itself is, is little more than really, I mean, it's almost like a surrender.

I mean, if you think about where we started, uh, a few months ago and what policy has been for the last several decades and where we are today, uh, we have basically said for 60 days we are removing massive amounts of sanctions off, off oil, gas, and petrochemicals, uh, and refined products.

You can sell it anywhere in dollars.

We haven't done that in, in, uh, in many, many years.

Uh, they can also get some access to unfrozen, uh, their own f- unfrozen assets, you know, $6 to $12 billion, depending on which report you hear.

Uh, they get other benefits, and all they had to do was to open the straits and agree to talk.

Do you think that this is an accurate reflection of the potential risk of an additional closure? Because if there is true control by Iran over the Strait of Hormuz, should there be a higher premium to potentially offset against the risk of something like this happening again?

What does it mean to the American people?

Well, first, great to be with you.

Thank you for having me.

The strait is, is kind of neither here nor there.

It is officially now open.

The Iranians, uh, have opened it, even though during the negotiations they insisted that they closed it a couple of times.

Uh, Iranian ships are actually transiting at, uh, at really high levels, so a lot of Iranian oil.

So if the MOU in its current form, if you say it's basically a surrender, it's not a deal, what's the best possible outcome here?

Um, when you hear these claims that this is somehow going to be better, based on the facts, what's- what- what's your biggest problem with this document, the MOU?

So my biggest problem is that we've signed a document that says, "Iran, you get money, control, uh, access to unfrozen assets.

We reverse the- we give a waiver on your oil and petrochemical sanctions, and all you have to do is open the Straits and agree to talk to us about something they were already talking to us before the war." We're giving- e- that entire document is giving incentives to Iran.

All they have to do is open the Straits.

That's it.

That is my problem.

And we got out of the JCPOA, the, the 2015 agreement-

This seems to be a concession to Iran.

prepare for that?

I think we will prepare for that.

And in fact, some of it has already happened.

So this is similar to two other events.

One is the 1970s, which led us to build a strategic reserve, created the IEA, the International Energy Agency.

Structures of the energy market were different moving forward after the 1970s.

They were very different before, changed forever.

funny, actually.

We're, we're seeing gas prices go up at the pump, but when we say energy crisis, some people go back to those 1970 photographs of cars lined around blocks for, you know, half a mile waiting to get gas at a gas station in America.

Well, it's good to be back, and it is the worst crisis because in the 1970s when we saw those lines, it was just oil coming through the Strait of Hormuz.

But today, we have five countries in Asia that have gone to a four-day workweek to conserve energy.

They have restricted flights throughout their countries to conserve jet fuel.

Airports in Europe are starting to talk about a shortage.

This is not a risk of a shortage, this is an actual shortage.

And so all those things that we import from other countries are gonna come to us.

The third thing I learned was helium.

I mean, Amos, maybe to start with you on that, how do you think the, uh, the war is affecting energy as we're seeing it, as I say, at the end of this fourth week?

Well, Ed, I think thatThe war started with, uh, sort of a rolling sense of goals, right? It started with which fits into where we are today, right? It started out with the president said, "Help is on the way," during the protests.

So the war was really about the protests, but then it morphed into some days it was about missiles, some days it was about re-obliterating the obliterated, uh, nuclear, uh, sites.

Uh, and then the Israelis had continuously injected the idea of regime change, um, fairly directly.

Uh, although the president was very careful not to talk about regime change, except for sometimes he did talk about, "I wanna choose the next ayatollah," et cetera.

Um, so the reason I, I bring up sort of the lack of goals, one, very diff- from my experience in multiple administrations of working in, in conflict, very difficult to achieve victory in conflict when you don't know what the goal is or what, how it's defined, and hard to maintain public support when the p-public doesn't know what the goal is either.

Uh, so they're willing to take it when it doesn't affect them, but if it affects them and they don't know what the goal is, then now I don't know why I'm paying more for a conflict that I'm not sure why I ever got into.

Um, that is a different situation than we had on February 27th, and that is a risk that now must be thought of from here going forward.

Can you give us a quick breakdown on your current role at TWG and also your previous role at the White House?

So I'm, today I'm the managing partner at TWG Global.

Uh, I look after, uh, our investments in...

It's a holding company, and I look at- through a lot of our investments in energy infrastructure and the connection between from power to AI, data centers, uh, and things in between.

We, TWG had launched an AI company.

We're invested in some of the data center side, uh, and a lot of tech space, and now connecting that, so if you will, from the, uh, wellhead to the, to data.

Um, before that, uh, for the previous four years, I was at, at the White House working as a senior advisor to President Biden.

Mm.

... threat over the weekend, which is now retracted, and does- Donald Trump is probably thinking he has solved his economic problems by retracting that threat.

threat.Look, I think that there is a-- throughout this war, once the Iranians made clear that they have the leverage of the straits, and with it, the energy crisis, and as I had said to Jen Psaki last week, this is not an oil crisis.

This is the worst energy crisis we have ever seen.

We have something in the nine to ten million barrels of oil that are, uh, off the market every day, uh, out of about a hundred and five million barrels that the world needs.

But what we don't talk about as much when we focus on oil is that it's also diesel for all our trucks around the world, that it is jet fuel, and airlines are gonna start cutting back flights and passing on to consumers, to passengers, to all of us, the cost of fuel surcharges.

And that's coming.

And it also means that there is fertilizers for farmers are not coming, helium gas for semiconductors, and more products, and of course, LNG and natural gas.

The, uh, what do you make of Donald Trump's formulation about in the end who's gonna control the Strait of Hormuz? Today he said, literally, "Me and the Ayatollah."

But at this point.

At this point, what you wanna...

They're, they're throwing a lot of different things at it, so that's also confusing the oil markets.

When you hear that there's a problem, and the person responsible for the problem says to you on Monday, "I'm gonna do an insurance scheme from the government," and on Tuesday they say, "Well, we're not gonna do that 'cause that's not gonna work.

So we're gonna do the SPR.

But no, no, we're not gonna do that.

We're gonna unsanction Russian oil, or we'll unsanction Iranian oil," for all of them, you start thinking they don't have a plan because they're coming up with a new plan every day.

Mm-hmm.

W- what do you think about where, uh, oil prices are and, and more importantly, where they may head from here?

Good morning, Becky.

Uh, look, I actually think no surprises have happened.

Everything that we're seeing in the market was, I think, broadcast since last Monday.

So the war started on Saturday with a shock and awe taking out the supreme leader and a lot of military leaders with a lot of headlines that, uh, the command and control of Iran would be gone by Tuesday, Wednesday.

That obviously didn't happen.

When you shut down the Strait of Hormuz, whether by closure, de facto or de jure, right? The, the baseline is that it is ships are not crossing, except for very, very few, and you have a disruption somewhere in the 10 million barrel, uh, of oil plus jet fuel and, and diesel and other refined products, then oil prices are priced today, uh, I think still even maybe a little bit complacently.

... what, what objectives can and should be met? What is the off-ramp, if there is one? Um, how do you see this playing out?

Those are the three red lines of the administration.

There's no doubt the Iranian threat to the region in December and today are the same from that perspective.

Uh, as the president said, the nuclear program was set back years, not months.

Uh, and the missile program is the one that is really of concern.

Uh, but that wasn't what led us here, Pam Marie.

It was the protesters.

Help is on the way.

How does the use of artificial intelligence and the US's preeminence in that sphere change this discussion and frankly change all discussions going forward when it comes to some military negotiations?

And for Americans watching this play out who may not be as immersed as you are in what's happening, why is this so important for America, these talks?

Well, look, we have to think about why we got here.

Iran has been an enemy of the United States, has been an adversary with clashes between the United States and Iran, really through proxies over the last several decades.

And that's been happening consistently.

Iran escalated its attacks against Israel, against American forces in the region after October 7 at different flashpoints.

And then during the demonstrations that the Iranian people had in January against the regime, they brutally massacred their own people.

That is, and remember, President Trump said, help is on the way.

And the protests did calm down, but there are still a lot of issues there, right? So how, what place does that put the US when you have the president pledging that and not following through with that?

And if so, is that a world that Israel should welcome, or are there dangers for Israel in a world where you no longer have even the aspiration for international law and restraints?

It's hard for me to answer that question, 'cause I'm not sure that I agree with the premise on, on, on international law.

I think international law was a concept that was favored and pursued post-World War II by...... a relatively small number of countries, implemented by an even smaller set of countries.

Uh, the main powers of the world did not accept the notion of extraterritorial international law.

Never did.

Uh, the I- the United States has never been a partner to the ICJ, to the ICC.

Uh, when it went to the Senate, it was, i- it never got ratified.

Uh, what would you say to them is on offer? What is the choice they face?

Mm-hmm.

... and when the pressure mounts, they find them.

Look, Hamas is a terrorist organization that hijacked, not only kidnapped live hostages, but also dead bodies.

And so, they knew where they were.

It was always a card that they had to use.

What we have to focus on is not just only the tactical of day-to-day, are they gonna find the bodies or not, but what happens next? And right now, the only two-state solution we have is the two states of Gaza, right? 'Cause Israel is in control of a certain part of Gaza and Hamas is in control of the other.

And the negotiations around a foreign force coming in, what does that look like? Hamas is not incentivized to give up its arms.

Yeah.

Uh, but what do you think the risks are if this attack gets the green light from the president?

So first of all, I'm not convinced it's not the scenario now.

I still think if I, if I were back in my old job, I would still say, "Why don't we go out with a 72-hour ceasefire, um, with a deal on the table that largely dismantles the capability of Fordow becoming a nuclear facility, a military facility, um, with expanded inspections, maybe 24/7 inspections, et cetera, et cetera." Uh, and then whoever...

if whoever rejects it is the, is the loser, right? So if Iran rejects it, then I stay out of the way of Israel doing what they have to do, and if Israel rejects it, I tell the, uh, I tell them I'm not...

then you're on your own.

I'm not, I'm not doing Fordow.

So I think that there's a way to still have that outcome.... commitment.

The President has been quite public saying, you know, "Yes, you may have missed your opportunity, but there still is one." And then if I could follow up by saying, what if Israel takes the United States up on, you know, their ultimatum, "Listen, if- if you're not gonna stop, you're on your own," if they really view this as an existential threat, i- it does sound like Israel does have contingency plans to do this on their own.

Is this the, the key shift that's taken place, uh, of Saudi Arabia that is now a kind of provider of security?

Well, Fareed, thank you for having me.

It's good to be here.

Look, I think that a ma- I agree with Kim, a major shift has happened in the Middle East since, uh, in the Gulf particularly, since, uh, Donald Trump as president went there in 20, uh, in his beginning of his first term.

And what we saw is a shift from not just as Saudi Arabia-... maturing, uh, both economically and politically, uh, but the whole region shifting away on a poli- on, on very important policies.

They did not like the JCPOA, the f- the agreement that was reached between the United States and Iran, uh, during the Obama administration on, uh, its nuclear program, uh, and were more on the Israeli position on that.

Today, and for the last several years, uh, they more, are more in line with supporting a new deal that can be reached because they look at stability.

What is going on you think between, uh, Jerusalem and Washington?