This conversation was recorded on March 16, 2026.
The Trump administration says the Iran war is going great. Rising gas prices, 110 backed-up tankers, and NATO’s flat refusal to help protect the Strait of Hormuz suggest the picture is more complicated. So I’m bringing you a view from outside the US.
Roxane Farmanfarmaian is a University of Cambridge political scientist with an expertise in the Middle East and North Africa. Her insight is structural, historical and personal. Her father was director of the National Iranian Oil Company and a key OPEC founding signatory who fled Iran in 1979 — a history she wrote about in Blood and Oil: Memoirs of a Persian Prince.
She gives us what’s hard to find in US coverage: the view from Europe, the Gulf states, and inside Iran, and the longer-term consequences that haven’t made headlines yet.
