Well, it has been nearly six months since the start of the United States and Iran war.

To learn more about that conflict, we caught up with a professor with the University of Kentucky who lectures on security and diplomacy.

Right now, we are in what is best described as a holding pattern with Iran.

Iran is still blockading the Strait of Hormuz.

It's not exactly a blockade, but essentially they're threatening to fire upon any oil tanker that moves through the strait unless it pays a fee, and many of them don't want to pay fees.

And so traffic is still choked right at the choke point in the strait from our response to that has been to install another blockade, a more distant blockade on Iranian ports, which are outside the Persian Gulf and outside the Strait of Hormuz.

So essentially, there is a double blockade on the Persian Gulf itself, and Iran is being blockaded.

And so essentially what we're doing right now is we are waiting until one side suffers enough pain to cry, uncle.

And when that happens, we can hopefully have peace talks.

So this is the most contentious moment we have ever had with Iran, probably even more so than when the Iranian hostage crisis was taking place in the early 1980s.

And so what we're trying to do, and what we've been trying to do since the end of February, is get back to square one.

Get back to a situation where the oil is moving through, and we can resume something that looks like peaceful relations on both sides.

And the economic impact of the war can be reduced and eventually can sort of phase out across the world.

So our strategic our strategic objectives have been a little bit confused since the beginning of the war.

The Trump administration has discussed a number of different possible objectives at different times.

Initially, when the war started, it was supposed to be about destroying the Iranian nuclear program.

And very possibly and there was a lot of talk about this in the administration, causing regime change, essentially toppling the Iranian government.

And so that characterize why we blew up their supreme leader on the first day of the war, really the first morning of the war, and conducted a lot of other attacks on Iran.

Right.

We were really looking for maximalist objectives, right?

The collapse of the Islamic Republic, as the war has developed, a real core interest has become the Strait of Hormuz and opening the Strait of Hormuz.

I don't want to be super, super clear about this because it's really important.

The Strait of Hormuz was open before February 28th, right?

So we are trying to get back to a place now where we were before the war started.

So the economic impact in the United States is one of the big dogs that hasn't quite barked yet.

A lot of people were worried back in March that we were going to see an immediate economic crisis, both in the United States and globally.

There's a bunch of reasons why that hasn't happened.

The biggest reason is that China has been spending down its stockpiles of oil and also undertook steps to massively reduce consumption of oil, and so prices of oil have remained manageable.

The Iranians are also smuggling oil.

We're looking for oil from different sources and that has kept oil prices and gas prices at least sort of vaguely reasonable.

But certainly a lot higher than they were before we started the conflict.

So people may remember, like in Kentucky, I think gas was around $2.60.

Before the war started, it got all the way up until about 430 or something along those lines to my memory.

And now it's around 390, depending on where you are and when gas prices and energy prices are high, there is an impact across the entire economy, right?

Because everything we have, everything we do is moved by a truck, or it's moved by a plane or it's moved by a ship.

And so as long as all of that transport infrastructure, the price of transit is going up, all of our prices are going to go up.

All right.

And so you're going to see sort of enduringly high inflation, enduringly high prices for tons of different stuff, even stuff that doesn't come from the Middle East because of the price of oil.

So tomorrow you'll hear more of that interview with Doctor Farley, specifically about why Kentuckians should care about this war.