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Fareed Zakaria GPS

U.S. and Iran Closing in on A Deal; The Science Behind SpaceX's Trillions. Interview With Barnard College Physics And Astronomy Professor Janna Levin; Interview With A.I. Policy Expert Molly Kinder. Aired 10-11a ET

Aired June 14, 2026 - 10:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[10:00:46]

FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN ANCHOR: This is GPS, the GLOBAL PUBLIC SQUARE. Welcome to all of you in the United States and around the world. I'm Fareed Zakaria, coming to you from New York.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Today on the program, here we go again. Are Washington and Tehran actually on the verge of a deal? I'll ask Ian Bremmer and Karim Sadjadpour.

Then Friday's SpaceX IPO took off like a rocket. So what does space exploration in the 21st century look like? Can we have data centers in space? How long until we get to Mars? Answers to that and more with an astrophysicist.

Then A.I. might not have brought about a job apocalypse yet, but my guest says what comes next will be a massive political and economic problem that will last for decades.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: But first, here's "My Take."

At a time when President Trump and Republicans are faring poorly in most polls, the story has been different in California. Republican Steve Hilton finished ahead of many high spending Democrats in the governor's race to advance to the November election, facing Democrat Xavier Becerra. In Los Angeles, an overwhelmingly Democratic city, Spencer Pratt, a Republican, former reality television personality, looked as if he might make the mayoral general election before finishing third.

California Democrats will be tempted to dismiss all this as a sideshow, but the frustration is real and justified. California is one of the most dynamic places on the planet. It has Silicon Valley, Hollywood, world class universities, extraordinary agriculture, ports, talent and natural beauty. But it is a case study in how a rich society can spend more and more while producing less and less of what its ordinary citizens need. The paradox of California today is a successful economy attached to a

failing model of governance. Consider the fiscal record. Since 2000, California's population has grown by roughly 15 percent. But the state's general expenditures have grown more than 200 percent, from $78 billion to about $248 billion. General spending per person has risen from about $2,300 to about $6,300. The number of state employees has grown by more than 50 percent by one count.

Does anyone think that California government and its benefits have gotten 200 percent better in the last 25 years?

Housing is the central failure. California has long spoken the language of compassion while building a system of exclusion. Alicia Finley writes in the "Wall Street Journal" that from 2021 to 2024, the L.A. metro area, with nearly 13 million people, issued only 118,000 building permits for new homes. Atlanta with about half that population issued 163,000.

California has made it too hard, slow and expensive to build. The result is predictable. Home prices soar, rents rise, workers commute farther, homelessness grows, young people leave. And people are leaving. Over the past seven years, the state has lost a net 1.9 million people through domestic migration.

For generations, people moved to California to pursue the future. Now, many middle class people are leaving because they can't afford one. Or look at education. For years, California schools had a plausible excuse. They were underfunded. Total spending on education through 12th grade has more than doubled since the early 2010s, and per pupil spending by 2023 was well above the national average. Yet the results remain dismal.

[10:05:02]

In the 2024 nation's report card, California was 43rd in fourth grade math, 39th in fourth grade reading, 36th in eighth grade math, and 38th in eighth grade reading. Homelessness tells the same story in a more painful register. A 2024 audit revealed California had spent $24 billion on the problem over a five-year span. Yet in 2024, California reached a record high in homelessness, almost 200,000.

Homelessness did decline by about 3 percent from 2024 to 2025. But the state's expansive, expensive and elaborate homelessness aid complex has not proven to solve homelessness in any significant way. California's headline prosperity, generated in good part by a few industries like high tech, masks weaknesses underneath. Job creation has been sluggish. In 2025, California essentially failed to add any new jobs on net.

Private industries outside government and government supported health care actually shed jobs, according to the Center for Jobs and the Economy. The state is using public spending to paper over private sector stagnation. Nowhere is this more vivid than Los Angeles, where Hollywood, the city's defining industry, is in slow motion collapse. The effects are being felt not by celebrity actors and influencers, but the carpenters, costumers, sound engineers, camera operators, editors, drivers, caterers, dry cleaners, prop houses and small businesses that once formed one of the world's great industrial clusters.

The numbers are stark. One report found L.A. shoot days fell from 36,792 in 2022 to just 19,694 in 2025. Another report estimates film, television and sound jobs fell by nearly 30 percent. Motion picture employment in L.A. County fell from about 142,000 at the end of 2022 to roughly 100,000 two years later.

Hollywood is still the symbol, the brand, the mythology, and it still houses the big studios that produced most of the world's greatest entertainment for almost a century. But thanks largely to high taxes, costs, and regulations, the work has moved elsewhere to Georgia, New Jersey, Toronto, and London and Warsaw.

Michael Lynton, who ran Sony Entertainment, told me that the big studio lots looked like ghost towns now, with tens of acres of soundstages and recording studios where nothing is happening. He said, "Los Angeles is becoming a sunny version of Detroit."

Consider this simple fact. According to "Fortune," none of the 10 films nominated for Best Picture this year were primarily produced in Hollywood. Los Angeles still hosts the Oscars, but increasingly it does not actually make the movies being honored there.

For years, Democrats in California have governed without any real competition. The recent primary results suggest that even in deep blue territory, voters are restless. They're not becoming Republicans. But they are asking a reasonable question. Why does a state with so much money, talent, and promise make life for ordinary people so hard?

Go to FareedZakaria.com for a link to my "Washington Post" column this week.

Next on GPS, Trump has said the U.S. is on the verge of a deal with Iran about 40 times since the beginning of the conflict. Is it real this time? We'll explore.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:13:25]

ZAKARIA: The United States and Iran appear to be closer to an agreement to end the war than at any point since it began nearly four months ago. A U.S. official said a memorandum of understanding would lift the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, though Iran has maintained that the strait would not return to the pre-war status quo.

It's believed that the deal would essentially extend the ceasefire for 60 days, while the two sides negotiate Iran's nuclear program and other sticking points. President Trump seems highly motivated to get the deal signed today in honor of his 80th birthday. But will it happen?

Joining me now are Karim Sadjadpour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment focusing on Iran and the U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, and Ian Bremmer, the president of the Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy.

Karim, what is your understanding of what is going to happen, you know, today or tomorrow in the next few days. And here's my key question because this is where there seems to be a lot of back and forth where the Trump administration is very eager to say that Iran is getting no money, yet it does appear from every account that Iran is going to get some kind of unfreezing of assets. Otherwise, it doesn't seem willing to lift the blockade.

What is your sense of what's going on?

KARIM SADJADPOUR, CNN GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST: That's right, Fareed. Phase one of this deal would be a mutual lifting of the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.

[10:15:02]

Whenever they reach that phase one, phase two would then tackle the more difficult issue, which is the nuclear issue. And President Trump's dilemma is he called Obama's nuclear deal the worst deal in history because it handed over billions of dollars in cash to Iran. Now, Iran is demanding significant amounts of cash up front in order to agree even to phase one of the deal. President Trump doesn't want to provide any cash to Iran until it agrees to some nuclear compromise.

So I think the way they've tried to reconcile that is that America's Gulf partners will probably be unfreezing some assets, handing over some cash. But fundamentally, Fareed, in my view, whenever a deal is reached, whether it's this week or next week, it's going to be a settlement that really settles nothing. The fundamental issues, whether it's Iran's nuclear ambitions, its missile program, its regional proxies or the character of the regime is unfortunately not going to change.

ZAKARIA: So, Ian, if that is the case, what does the -- what does this mean in practice? It just, it extends the ceasefire? The strait does open. Would it then -- is there a likelihood that it would close again? Because the chance of this all getting negotiated in 60 days is probably not very high.

IAN BREMMER, PRESIDENT, EURASIA GROUP: Yes, but they don't want it to close again, in part because we are going to see much worse economic challenges if that occurs. One of the surprises over the past weeks has been oil prices after going up a lot has stayed pretty steady. And the reason for that is because there's some demand destruction at higher prices, and also because the Chinese are buying five million barrels, importing five million barrels a day less. That's been extraordinary, not expected.

But inventories in the West are getting much lower. And so Trump has urgency here in part because he understands that another shoe would drop economically. So no, what we're going to see is a return to the status quo ante where the strait was open and the Americans were negotiating the nuclear file with the Iranians unsuccessfully, with Iran extending and pretending, kicking the can down the road.

That's exactly the position that we will be in when a memorandum is likely agreed to in the coming days or weeks, but with the Iranians in a stronger position having been paid off.

ZAKARIA: So, Karim, we've heard a lot about this compared to the Iran nuclear deal. Give us a sense of the kind of broad ways in which this is similar and it's different. I mean, I've heard people say that what Trump is now going to agree to is actually going to be worse than the Iran nuclear deal. What's your sense?

SADJADPOUR: The key difference, Fareed, is that President Trump is trying to get Iran to suspend its enrichment of uranium for several years. Initially, they wanted that Iran to agree to cease enrichment forever. I think that number has probably dropped down to 10 years. And so I think in President Trump's victory speech, he's going to say that Obama only got Iran to enrich at low levels, whereas the Trump administration, you know, got to, let's say, a 10-year suspension of enrichment.

But the question is, at what cost? This war has cost American taxpayers perhaps north of $100 billion. And again, as Ian alluded to, it doesn't resolve the problem. It pauses the war, pauses the problem. But I certainly have no confidence that Iran is going to abide by anything it signs here.

ZAKARIA: OK, expand on that because there are -- because you don't have that elaborate system of inspections and cameras that the Obama deal had.

SADJADPOUR: You don't have the same inspections regime. The mistrust is 10 times what it was before. And in the 2015 JCPOA, two of the important signatories to that deal were Iranian partners, China and Russia. This time, it's essentially a deal between the Islamic Republic of Iran and President Trump. And they've said that on a couple of occasions, President Trump has abrogated his terms of the deal.

So what I'm quite concerned about are these underground missile cities that no matter what Iran agrees to sign, it will try to reconstitute its nuclear program in these underground missile cities, which in some cases are even more hardened than their nuclear facilities were.

ZAKARIA: So, Karim, fair to say, I remember your views on the Obama nuclear deal. Correct me if I'm wrong, you reluctantly supported it. You felt there were many, many problems. But it did at least put the nuclear program in a box. If you're saying this is worse in many senses, do you think it's -- is this not worth signing from the point of view of the United States?

[10:20:00]

SADJADPOUR: This is unfortunately the dilemma that President Trump has put himself in with this war, Fareed. In my view, and I did support the Obama nuclear deal. I thought it was 60-40 positive. The challenges that weren't addressed, of course, were Iran's regional proxies, its missile programs. So I don't think America's entire strategy should just be a nonproliferation strategy. But this time around, I think it's going to be worse and that we've essentially convinced Iran that they need nuclear weapons as a cloak of immunity.

And again, I don't think that we are going to be confident that they're going to abide by the terms of anything they sign.

ZAKARIA: Ian, tell us about the geopolitics of the region. What does this -- where does this leave America's Gulf allies who have relied on the United States to provide order, to provide stability and to kind of intelligently contain Iranian ambitions?

BREMMER: It really unnerves them because they understand that on the back of a unilateral American decision that a relatively small country can put them at risk and can hold a 100 plus trillion dollar global economy to ransom. And there are big implications of that. One is that OPEC is functionally dead. That's why the Emiratis have left. They don't want to be held with stranded assets and so they're now going to once this deal is done start producing and exporting as much energy as they can, getting the price down, but also moving on with being a global node.

And their core ally is Israel. They're part of an Abrahamic coalition that really is going to be much closer to the United States. They were fighting against Iran with the Israelis, sharing intelligence, and they're going to have a big problem with Iran going forward. The Saudis, on the other hand, have much more of a Muslim alliance, and they are regional anchors supported by Pakistan with a nuclear program that they have funded, in part. Also with 13,000 troops on the ground, closer with the Turks, closer with the Egyptians, and eventually hedging more with the Chinese.

Why? Because they're exporting a lot of oil at low cost that the Chinese need. But competing with the United States. So there's a fracture that's coming much bigger in the Gulf. Final point is that this is also going to affect countries around the world that see that these straits, not just here but also the Red Sea, also Malacca, are very vulnerable. It's moving them to renewable energy in a much, much faster way.

The same decision the Emiratis are making in the region, they're going to make globally. We could look back on this in 10 years and see that orange is the new green. Trump will have done more for renewable energy unintentionally than any other president in U.S. history.

ZAKARIA: Karim, we have about a minute, but I want you to talk about something that really was front and center and that has disappeared. The Iranian people, they seem to be facing a tougher regime, more of a military dictatorship than the kind of mixed regime that existed. And no one is talking about their welfare anymore.

SADJADPOUR: That's such an important question, Fareed. What got us into this war were the nationwide uprisings in Iran in January. And President Trump said to the Iranian people, help is on the way. And instead, this war has been the worst of both worlds, I would argue, and that it's essentially resuscitated what I would have called a zombie regime that had a dying ideology, dying leader, dying legitimacy.

It's breathed new life into that zombie regime, and it's totally neglected the Iranian people. Ultimately, Fareed, in my view, the Islamic Republic of Iran is like a mini-Soviet Union, and you're never really going to see change or regional stability until you have a government in Iran whose organizing principle is the national interest of Iran, rather than the revolutionary ideology of 1979. And this war unfortunately didn't advance us closer to that outcome.

ZAKARIA: Ian Bremmer, Karim, thank you so much.

BREMMER: Biggest foreign mistake of the Trump administration by a very long margin.

ZAKARIA: Thank you. Thank you, Ian. Thank you, Karim. We got to go.

Next up, the science behind SpaceX. Can it achieve its moonshots or maybe better to call them Mars shots? Are they realistic? I'll ask an astrophysicist in a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:28:54]

ZAKARIA: On Friday, Elon Musk's rocket company SpaceX launched an initial public offering, and it broke the record, becoming the largest IPO ever. In the lead up to it, Musk outlined a series of ambitious goals for the company, including putting A.I. data centers in space and building factories on the moon. These are amazing visions, but can they become reality?

Joining me now is Janna Levin, an astrophysicist and professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College.

Welcome, Janna.

JANNA LEVIN, PHYSICS AND ASTRONOMY PROFESSOR, BARNARD COLLEGE: Thanks so much for having me.

ZAKARIA: So tell us, you know, what's the science behind some of these things? Getting to the moon, how difficult would it be to set up manufacturing facilities on the moon?

LEVIN: Yes. I mean, there's a measure of difficulty. It's going to be extremely challenging. Yet I think it's achievable.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: So does this look OK?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

LEVIN: Humans are very vulnerable on the moon. They're vulnerable to solar winds and solar radiation. And one of the things that's going to have to happen is to build a protective structure, as well as harnessing solar energy and finding water, which we think exists in ice form deep in these craters on the moon. So all of these things have to come together to make a viable space station.

ZAKARIA: How long -- and how long would it take to get to the moon?

LEVIN: To get to the technological stage where we're able to actually inhabit the moon for long stretches? I think it's really hard to project. I think they know. They admit in the prospectus that SpaceX released, that it's going to rely on technologies that don't yet exist.

Ideally in a fantasy world, and that kind of sci-fi future, we send robots there to build a lot of the infrastructure so that it's then safe for humans to move in and begin to take up the rest of the charge.

ZAKARIA: Are data centers in space an easier thing to imagine? I mean, I think about it.

LEVIN: Yes.

ZAKARIA: It's like the international space station in a sense, right?

LEVIN: Yes. Data centers in space are easier to imagine. There's a real sense that we could do that sooner and faster. Ironically, one of the problems is that they don't cool off.

So right now, the data centers on Earth boil lakes, right? It's not something we like as the climate impacts the negativity of that. In space, they will, obviously, not be having that kind of ramification on the biosphere, but it's hard to cool in a vacuum of space.

ZAKARIA: Data centers have huge cooling systems --

LEVIN: Yes.

ZAKARIA: -- on Earth to cool them down.

LEVIN: Right.

ZAKARIA: Why couldn't you put those in space?

LEVIN: Well, it's more expensive. It's more stuff to go up there. It's more stuff to break.

ZAKARIA: To me, Mars seems the biggest lift in the sense. It just feels like -- and I say this with my enormous expertise is based on the movie "The Martian."

LEVIN: Which is, you know, pretty good.

ZAKARIA: It seems very hard to live there.

LEVIN: Yes.

ZAKARIA: You have to be in an astronaut uniform all the time.

LEVIN: Yes, yes. ZAKARIA: Suit all the time. You have to grow stuff in massive, self- contained, hermetically sealed tents. It takes months, maybe years to get there.

LEVIN: Months, yes. Yes, years. Yes, it could be.

ZAKARIA: So, how you could -- right. So it just seems to me like you that have to be some big upside to doing it.

LEVIN: Yes. Why? Why are we going to Mars? Part of it is just blind ambition, just the human compulsion to travel, to explore. It's not going to be an alternative to Earth. Sometimes it's sold that way in this. But that's kind of comic book.

Here we have this amazing, wonderful planet, and it has a great magnetic field and a wonderful atmosphere, and it has oceans and it's teeming with life. And as far as we know, it's the only example of life in our solar system.

We might go to Mars and find microbes, and yet we think we're going to terraform an entire planet when we can't quite cap the human impact that we've had on our own biosphere here.

ZAKARIA: Now, the last time we set ourselves a great deadline was Kennedy saying we're going to get to the moon.

LEVIN: Yes.

ZAKARIA: The difference, it seems to me, is then it was a government project. It was a kind of collective American project. Everything I've just described is essentially going to be done by SpaceX or another private company.

LEVIN: Right. Yes.

ZAKARIA: What are the implications of that?

LEVIN: Well, I don't think we can completely unpack them yet. I think there's some of that that's exciting because we know that individual industry can be very ambitious in a way that a government cannot.

NASA can never tolerate the kind of failures that, for instance, SpaceX is comfortable with. Things blow up on the launch pad. They just go back. They're not beholden to the taxpayer. They're not -- they're not restricted by being overly cautious.

What's terrifying is where does -- where does science fit into this? And where does the sense of space as a commons fit into this? And that, I think can be quite alarming.

It's also, will financial incentive completely overpower all the kind of dreaming that human beings have done just to devise ways of going to space? Everything that spacefaring technologies rely on were all the dreamers, you know, back to Kepler, back to Galileo. They were simply finding orbits, understanding celestial mechanics, looking at the celestial bodies, thinking about quantum mechanics in the later years, where is all that going to go? Is it only going to be money? And I think that's scary.

ZAKARIA: And is it now going to be CEOs looking at quarterly returns --

LEVIN: Exactly.

ZAKARIA: -- given that this is now going to be a public company?

LEVIN: Right, right. Or will there be an attempt to say, we're going to redirect some of this to exploration, to science, theoretical, experimental, observational science, just for science's sake. People used to talk about the usefulness of useless knowledge. And if you don't have that, you never have the technology to even think about going to Mars.

ZAKARIA: What a pleasure. Thank you so much.

LEVIN: Thank you so much, Fareed.

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, the anxiety around A.I. replacing jobs is palpable these days, but the labor market data shows that the panic may be premature. So what is the reality? Up next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:39:36]

ZAKARIA: A new Reuters/Ipsos poll out this week finds that more than half of Americans believe A.I. could put them or someone in their household out of a job. And yet unemployment in May sat at just 4.3 percent, well below the historic average of 5.66 percent. So, what is really going on? Is A.I. actually displacing workers, or is the fear outpacing the reality?

[10:40:03]

Joining us now to help make sense of all of this is Molly Kinder, who studies AI's impact on jobs. Until recently, she was a senior fellow at Brookings.

So, Molly, explain that paradox. Everyone is worried about A.I. Already you do hear some companies say they're not hiring or they're letting go of 10 percent of their programmers, but it isn't showing up in the aggregate data.

MOLLY KINDER, A.I. POLICY EXPERT: So, Fareed, I think the anxiety we are seeing permeating society is not about where A.I. is right now or where jobs are right now, it's where we're going. So, it is correct that right now the labor market data does not yet reflect a serious impact on jobs.

What we are entering is something I call the messy middle. As we move forward and as A.I. technologies get better, that's when we're going to start seeing impacts on jobs, not a full jobs apocalypse, but we're going to start seeing select jobs, select occupations really be impacted. ZAKARIA: Where are you seeing the most likely? I mean, people have talked about programing, but take us through what is the nature of the jobs that are going to be displaced in this first -- in this messy middle?

KINDER: So in this messy middle, the jobs that are going to be the front line of displacement are jobs that are primarily at a computer. I have a strap line. If you can do your job locked in a closet with a computer, eventually, you're going to probably be in trouble.

Think about it as the reverse of COVID. The people that were at risk during COVID of the virus had to go into a workplace, whether it was a hospital or a school or a repair shop. Those of us in the laptop class could stay at home safely and type on our computer and be safe.

We're going to see a reverse when we think of the risk. Jobs that A.I. is best able to substitute for tend to be cognitive tasks that are primarily done at a computer. That has pretty profound political implications, because these are some of the most coveted best jobs in the economy. These are the jobs that in past decades have been the winners of the technological changes. We could start seeing that reversing.

ZAKARIA: So Excel came -- was created by Microsoft, and everyone said we won't need accountants anymore because everyone can now do these spreadsheets. And in fact, what happened was because Excel was there and cheaply available, everybody did spreadsheet analysis. And actually the number of accountants grew. And, you know, there was a kind of new demand for the product you didn't see. Could A.I. result, for example, in people needing to do all kinds of new stuff that we haven't thought about?

KINDER: I think there are many reasons for optimism that the economy, even with very smart A.I., is going to generate new jobs. There is also certainly going to be instances where as, say, legal services get cheaper, maybe there will be more demand for cheaper legal services, and you might see some of that work grow.

That being said, I think, most economists would agree that there is likely to be some concentrated displacement even if, overall, the job numbers hold flat and we don't see a jobs apocalypse. If we start to see displacement in concentrated pockets like we did in deindustrialization -- if you think back to the last several decades in the heartland, overall, our economy was strong. The numbers were going up in terms of GDP and job numbers. And yet you had this concentrated loss of jobs in the middle of the income spectrum in manufacturing, and that caused huge political and social pain.

We could see something similar if enough pockets of white collar work. A.I. isn't just something that augments, it actually substitutes. If we start seeing that in certain pockets, I think, we are going to face a similar political and social backlash that we saw in deindustrialization.

ZAKARIA: You said this is the messy middle.

KINDER: Yes.

ZAKARIA: What's at the end? What comes after the messy middle?

KINDER: You know, I think if you believe what the A.I. labs are saying, what comes after a messy middle is a period of abundance where if AGI arrives and we create such surplus, so much economic growth and A.I. and robotics are so capable, we may be materially very well off and we may not have to work in the same way in the past.

At that point, the question for society becomes one of purpose, one of making sure the surplus is shared equally and that democracy can survive. Those are three very important questions. Purpose, sort of inequality and democracy.

The mess -- but we're all in it together at that point. If we get to that other side, all of society will have -- we'll have to reimagine society and our purpose.

ZAKARIA: The robots and A.I. will basically --

KINDER: Take everything.

ZAKARIA: -- take everyone's job.

KINDER: Everyone's job. I think what's really challenging, and a lot of the reason why I wrote this piece on "The Messy Middle" was, I think, too many people in Silicon Valley think we're jumping straight to that world. And the reality is it's going to take us a long time to get, you know, the machines good enough to replace all of human tasks.

[10:45:00]

But in the messy middle --

ZAKARIA: And this could be decades.

KINDER: This could be decades. And I think what is a reason why the public feels anxious is there will be losers, concentrated losers, people who might have invested a lot of money in their education. And if we, as a country, don't figure out how to make sure that people on the losing end still keep a foothold on what they hold most dear, which is the ability to raise a family, the ability to do what they love, I think, we'll have a major political backlash.

So, I think that's why you're hearing such anxiety is there's a worry about what's ahead and a feeling that we have a lot of analysis, but not a lot of answers. And I think you see an anxious public wanting to hear from their leaders, what's the plan?

ZAKARIA: Molly, you've eased our anxiety just a little bit. Thank you.

Next on GPS, the war in Iran has led to the largest disruption to oil supply in history. Can the world use this crisis to support a green energy transition? There is some evidence that it's already happening.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) [10:50:44]

ZAKARIA: And now for the last look. For all the pain that the United States and Israel have inflicted on Iran since they began the war, they've also given that country a powerful gift of sorts, the opportunity to demonstrate to the world control over the Strait of Hormuz.

The strait handled about 20 million barrels of oil a day before the war, one-fifth of the world's total oil supply. By exerting control over the waterway, Iran has brought about what the International Energy Agency calls the largest disruption to global oil supply in history, sending oil prices soaring.

But Iran's weapon might be one with an expiration date on it. As "The Wall Street Journal" reports, Gulf countries are already scrambling to build up oil infrastructure to bypass the strait. In May, the UAE said it would speed up the construction of a second pipeline to its storage hub in Fujairah, which lies just beyond the Strait of Hormuz.

Saudi Arabia has redirected oil from the strait to its western port of Yanbu via its East-West Pipeline. That infrastructure, built up during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, is moving nearly 7 million barrels a day. Before the war, it moved just 2 million barrels a day. And "The Journal" notes Gulf countries are also talking about speeding up the construction of a rail corridor that would offer another route to move oil.

These solutions are imperfect. Pipelines are expensive and complicated to build, and they are vulnerable to drone attacks, and trains cannot move as much oil as ships, nor as cheaply.

Another strategy is not to find new paths for the supply of oil, but to reduce the demand for it. As the World Economic Forum notes, many countries are adopting energy saving policies to do just that. Indonesia and Myanmar have devoted one day of the week for public sector employees to work from home. Other countries have reduced school days or increased remote learning. Many countries are rationing fuel, but no country's attempts to slash oil imports and demand have been as consequential as those of the world's largest energy importer, China.

Today, China is taking in at least 3 million fewer barrels of oil per day than it did before the war. That's because Beijing has spent years inuring itself from just the kind of global energy supply shocks we're seeing today. It has stored up huge reserves of oil, and it runs its factories largely on domestic coal and renewables.

And as NYU's global affairs professor Carolyn Kissane writes in her newsletter, the Asian giant's reduction in oil imports is a key reason prices haven't climbed even higher. China has also limited consumption of energy at home. As JP Morgan's head of commodity strategy, Natasha Canova, observes, the reduction is not the result of government mandate. It seems to be largely driven by consumer choice and a ready availability of electric vehicles. China already has the largest fleet of EVs in the world, and people are using them more than ever. E.V. charging volumes on highways rose by 56 percent on the first day of the annual May Day holiday, compared to the year before. Residents are traveling more by train and less by jet.

The tactics countries and consumers have used to limit oil consumption are born of necessity, not of a desire for clean energy transition. In some cases, it is coal that is being substituted for oil, but in the long run, green technologies will benefit. NYU's Kissane predicts that oil demand will soon hit a plateau, not because climate policy suddenly triumphed or because governments collectively decided to consume less oil, but because insecurity forced adaptation.

History bears out that hypothesis. Look at the oil crisis of 1973. It led to a long period of lower oil consumption in the U.S. That's in part because it spurred America's introduction of fuel economy standards on cars. Europe and Japan were inspired to build up nuclear power capacity and expand public transport. The crisis made countries diversify their sources of energy, turning away from an overreliance on oil.

[10:55:05]

A more positive change is possible now because of the ready availability of renewables and EVs. As Bloomberg reports, the U.K. is introducing regulations that would require solar panels and energy efficient heat pumps in new homes. Vietnam wants 10 percent of houses to have rooftop solar panels by the end of the year. Indonesia's president says he wants all vehicles in his country to be electric. E.V. purchases surged in more than 30 countries in March, Bloomberg notes.

So in the long run, the surprising effect of this crisis might be that Iran loses a lever it has gained and the world diversifies toward green energy. Who would have guessed?

Thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week. I will see you next week.

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