The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 4 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.For Donald Trump, the news is getting worse on his war against Iran. A preliminary military report finds that the U.S. was behind the bombing of an Iranian nursery school, killing scores of children. New reporting confirms that the Trump team badly miscalculated Iran’s response to their invasion, leading to a developing energy fiasco, with some officials growing pessimistic about the lack of a strategy to finish the war—and they’re afraid to tell that to the president.Trump is publicly acknowledging none of this. He just urged oil companies to use the Strait of Hormuz regardless of danger, and he’s refusing to comment on how he’ll know when it’s time to end the war. So how do we get out of this situation if Trump’s unwilling to acknowledge the situation we’re in? We’re posing this question to Elizabeth Saunders, a political scientist at Columbia who focuses on foreign policy and has a new piece on the huge mess we’re in. Elizabeth, good to have you on.Elizabeth Saunders: Thanks. Good to be here.Sargent: So let’s start with the Strait of Hormuz, which abuts Iran and connects the Persian Gulf to the wider world. Can you just define the importance of the Strait of Hormuz in global terms, and how bad is the energy situation right now?Saunders: So basically this mess is like turning off the spigot that controls 20 percent of the world’s oil flow. And it’s literally like you have running water and then it’s 20 percent less—and it’s all because of this choke point in the Strait of Hormuz. And so the supply is going down and that sends the price of oil up. And it’s not like a normal oil shock where the Saudis or OPEC can get together and restart production, because these tankers are stuck inside the Persian Gulf. And the Gulf states have already filled up their storage tanks. And so they have to shut down the oil fields, which are not easy to restart. This is one of those shocks that is going to be very hard to get back to any sort of status quo before the war. And there’s also no end in sight, because this is not like when the container ship got stuck in the Suez Canal, right? Remember, istheboat stuck.com? Once the boat is unstuck, the canal reopens. This is not going to be like that, because the Iranians have so much weaponry and power and they’re not going anywhere, because that’s where they live. And so you now basically have 20 percent of the world’s oil flow held hostage, essentially, by Iran.And this has always been a threat. And one of the big reasons why presidents for 20 years who’ve considered striking Iran have been deterred from doing so is because this is such a dramatic shock to the world economy. The oil market is global. And so it’s not as though we can just pump more oil out of the ground in the U.S. to make up for it. It’s a global energy market. And so that’s going to drive the price of oil up. I’m no oil expert, no energy market expert, but if you make something 20 percent more scarce, it’s clearly going to have an effect. And that doesn’t even account for the problem of getting things back online, which will not necessarily be smooth.Sargent: Can you just define the importance of the Strait of Hormuz in global terms? And how bad is the energy situation right now?Saunders: It’s pretty bad, because 20 percent of the world’s oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz, which is a choke point 24 miles wide—but really much less than that, because it’s so shallow and the Iranians can target it from the shore. So tankers have been stuck and they can’t get through. And so this is backing up the world’s oil supply and driving up the price of oil, because when things get more scarce, the price goes up.Since the war began, oil prices have gone up around 20 percent. It’s been very volatile, but on average, I think that’s sort of the latest estimate. And of course, eventually that will mean prices will go up at the gas pump for Americans. And it’s only likely to get worse. We can talk about why that is, but I don’t see this ending cleanly anytime soon.Sargent: Well, let’s listen to Trump on this for a second. Here he’s asked whether oil companies should use the Strait of Hormuz. Listen.Reporter (voiceover): Are you talking to CEOs of various oil companies, encouraging them to use the Strait of Hormuz right now?Donald Trump (voiceover): Yeah, I think they should. I think they should. I think they should use it, if you want my opinion. Look, we took out just about all of their mine ships in one night. We’re up to boat number 60; I didn’t realize they had that big a navy.Sargent: So he doesn’t know how big Iran’s navy is, which—you’d think he should know as commander in chief. But that aside, what’s the story with what you’re hearing there? How do you make sense of it?