The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 13 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.The global fiasco that Donald Trump has created around the Strait of Hormuz is rapidly getting worse. An international agency says the closing of the strait is creating the largest global oil supply disruption in history. And a striking New York Times report outlines the enormous consequences this is starting to have for the world economy. There’s still no sign that Trump knows how to get out of this mess. CNN reports that there’s rising alarm and urgency within the administration over it.And Trump just unleashed a bizarre tweet about the situation that underscores just how lost he truly is. One of our go-to guests on topics like this is international relations professor Nicholas Grossman, who recently argued that the Iran war is demonstrating to Trump the limits of sheer bullying—which Trump thinks can accomplish anything. We’re talking to him about all of it. Nick, good to have you on.Nicholas Grossman: Hi, good to be back.Sargent: So Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz, creating a global oil shock, which seems to have been anticipated by everybody except the commander in chief of the world’s most powerful military. The International Energy Agency just announced that this is causing, quote, “the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.” Nick, can you boil down what that really means?Grossman: It means widespread economic disruption. There is reliance on energy through all aspects of the economy. There are also additional oil effects—things like uses for metallurgy processes, for example, different byproducts used for agriculture—and oil is a global commodity, meaning that it is produced in many different places. The United States both imports and exports; it refines products, it drills crude oil, and all of this is on a day-to-day supply chain. So when things get disrupted, there’s a little slack in the system, but really not much, and then the prices go up. A 20 percent supply decline is incredibly disruptive—it means that there is simply not enough oil to go around.This was the explicit thing that we saw coming. And by “we,” I mean the broad national security community. It is very likely that people inside the military and the national security establishment told this to the White House—whether Trump himself heard it, or didn’t listen, or others tried to tell him, who knows. But this was the exact reason why we said: yes, confront Iran, but in smarter ways, as opposed to this one thing. This is their big leverage—don’t play into it. And now the U.S. has, and it’s not going to clear up soon.Sargent: Well, The New York Times had a striking piece on the consequences you’re talking about, reporting that it’s delivering what they called a stunning punch to the global economy—higher oil prices everywhere, higher fertilizer prices, shipping costs soaring and so forth. Can you talk a little bit more about what these consequences could start to look like if this goes on for, I don’t know, maybe more than two or three more days?Grossman: So when it comes to the actual oil, there are problems with the oil industry itself in that the tankers aren’t moving, the supply depots are filling up, then they might have to reduce production and stop various wells—and those things are difficult to restart. They are costly. That takes some time. So there would be built-in delays almost no matter what. And that assumes that things clear up quickly—that either the U.S. stops right away, and even if the U.S. does that, Iran stops right away.But beyond that, where we will see it is things like higher gas prices, which is probably one that will be evident to tons of people. Effects on the stock market could make inflation overall worse. The longer it goes on—the more because energy costs are in just about everything—the more it will make overall prices rise. And then there are all the political implications of that, both domestic and geopolitical.Sargent: Yeah. And so CNN reports that Trump officials themselves are starting to seriously panic about all this. The CNN report says those officials have “frantically” sought ways to ease the crisis—they’re exploring a whole bunch of options, like getting oil companies involved, things like that, unleashing reserves, that type of thing. Nick, what do you make of that panic? And also, when it really comes down to it, there’s not a whole lot the administration can do here. Isn’t that sort of the essence of the problem?Grossman: Yeah, they ran into something that they can’t bullshit their way through.