# The Forever War Gets Scary

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/paul-krugman-podcast-7703924/the-forever-war-gets-scary
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/paul-krugman-podcast-7703924/the-forever-war-gets-scary.md
Podcast: [Paul Krugman Podcast](https://stenobird.com/podcast/paul-krugman-podcast-7703924)
Published: 2026-07-15T10:30:00+00:00
Episode link: https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-forever-war-gets-scary
Audio file: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/207078727/e75ff5390f17c4116d9abdd3f7f91601.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/paul-krugman-podcast-7703924/episodes/the-forever-war-gets-scary
Duration seconds: 397

## Resource

For all my interviews and more, subscribe on YouTube . Transcript The war with Iran has just reached a very scary phase, and I’m not talking about the bombs and the drones. Hi, Paul Krugman here, doing a brief podcast instead of a full post, because I actually spent the day with friends and doing other things, and this is a quicker alternative. If you’re following the news, you know that the sort-of ceasefire with Iran has been called off. Trump has reinstated the blockade. The Iranians are back to hitting things with their drones and missiles. The U.S. position has been wildly erratic. First, Trump said he was going to impose a 20% toll on all shipping, basically turning the Strait of Hormuz into a U.S. toll booth, which would have been wildly illegal and irresponsible, aside from being impossible. Now he says, no, he’s going to demand that countries invest in the United States, which is also actually wildly illegal. But in any case, it’s never going to happen. And yet, this is extremely scary. The reason to be afraid is not that I think the war is going to come to America. It’s not even that I think the United States is going to seriously try to occupy Iran. We don’t have the troops. We don’t have the missiles. Trump depleted a large share of our weaponry in the course of his failed war so far. So this is likely going to be punitive strikes, maybe some war crimes along the way, but that’s all. But what is really frightening here is that it does appear as if Trump has given up on trying to extract something that looks like victory. If we go back just a few days ago, it appeared that what was going to happen was that Trump was going to de facto pull out, give upon the project, take advantage of falling oil prices because the strait was sort of kind of open — and try to…

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## Transcript

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