At least 37 energy oil refineries, natural gas fields and other energy sites in nine countries have been damaged since the United States and Israel began bombarding Iran, a New York Times analysis found. Some have been struck by drones. Several have been hit more than once.

As the attacks escalate, both sides increasingly view energy as a potent target — one that is capable of inflicting severe economic pain. Iran depends on oil and natural gas to keep the lights on and its government running, while the United States wants to prevent prices from soaring further and damaging the underpinnings of the global order.

The question is no longer just when Iran’s tight grip on the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow but critical passage on its southern coast, will ease enough for most ships to pass. It is also how long it will take to complete repairs needed to produce and process oil and natural gas in the first place.

“The longer this war goes on, the more likely it is that the two sides are going to play their strongest energy-leverage cards,” said Clayton Seigle, an energy expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington research group. “The attacks on facilities are not easily reversible.”

To count the number of attacks and disruptions at energy facilities in the region, The New York Times reviewed statements from government, state-run and private energy companies. The Times also reviewed lists compiled by ClearView Energy Partners and the Institute for the Study of War, two research firms, and subsequently verified their findings.

Through Friday, The Times had found a total of 45 attacks, though there is no official accounting and more may have occurred. Strikes occur seemingly every day.

The importance of energy in the war became even clearer after Israel struck facilities tied to Iran’s South Pars gas field on Wednesday. Iran responded by lashing out across the Gulf. At least 10 sites were damaged this week, The Times found, including an energy hub in Qatar, as well as oil refineries in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Israel.

The various attacks sent oil and natural gas prices soaring as traders worried that much of the Gulf’s energy could remain effectively landlocked for a while, possibly months. Brent crude, the international oil benchmark, briefly topped $119 a barrel on Thursday morning before retreating. Oil fetched less than $73 a barrel before the war started on Feb. 28, a price that reflected the possibility of a war.

“It’s been the cumulative effect that’s really driven this crisis,” said Raad Alkadiri, a Washington-based political risk analyst who specializes in energy and the Middle East.

While oil has been front and center, analysts are especially concerned about the damage to the world’s largest natural-gas export terminal, called Ras Laffan, on Qatar’s coast.

The sprawling facility, which is operated by the state-owned QatarEnergy company, cools natural gas into liquid that can be loaded onto tankers and shipped. But Qatar said on the third day of the war that it had stopped producing liquefied natural gas, citing military attacks.

This week’s strikes caused further damage, compromising 17 percent of the country’s L.N.G. export capacity, QatarEnergy said on Thursday, adding that repairing the damage could take up to five years.

There is no easy replacement for that fuel, which is used to generate electricity and heat homes. And there is little spare L.N.G. capacity in other countries.

Other points of vulnerability include the oil export terminals where the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are rerouting oil to avoid the Strait of Hormuz. One of those areas, in the Emirates, was targeted as recently as this week. A refinery near the other, in Saudi Arabia, was also hit by a drone.

“It could become a lot worse if the craziness continues to prevail,” said Charif Souki, a former chief executive of Houston-based Cheniere Energy, a large L.N.G. company. “But there are so many people who have a vested interest in not letting it get too far out of hand.”

Indeed, countries around the world have agreed to release oil from emergency stores to stem rising prices. The U.S. military is also attacking Iranian vessels and drones to try to clear the Strait of Hormuz, and the Trump administration said it would lift sanctions on Iranian oil to nudge prices down.

In many cases, it is hard to know how severe the damage has been to a facility.

As Kevin Book, managing director of ClearView Energy Partners put it, “The last thing they probably want to do is tell Iran, ‘You missed me, try again.’”

Even when companies have been more forthcoming, their disclosures have sometimes only raised more questions.

Mr. Souki said he was surprised to hear that QatarEnergy expected it would take up to five years to repair its L.N.G. facilities. “I think he’s hedging his bets at the moment,” Mr. Souki said, referring to QatarEnergy’s chief executive. “You can always give good news later.”

Artificial intelligence powerhouse Anthropic’s battle with the Pentagon has sparked some soul-searching in Silicon Valley that could reshape the tech sector’s complicated relationship with war and the White House.

Anthropic is the San Francisco-based startup behind the chatbot Claude and some of the most powerful AI on the market. In its negotiations with the military, it has demanded guardrails on how its technology is used.

The military said it refused to be beholden to a corporation and pushed back, labeling Anthropic a threat akin to an enemy foreign power and blocking it from some government contracts.

Tech leaders have quietly backed Anthropic, saying that AI isn’t ready for some weapons and that strong-arming companies is counterproductive and antidemocratic. President Trump called Anthropic a bunch of “left-wing nut jobs.”

How this showdown plays out will affect not only Anthropic’s booming business but also the way tech titans and other corporations work with an administration known for lashing out at resisters, said Alan Rozenshtein, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota Law School.

“On the one hand, it could cause the government’s other Silicon Valley suppliers to be more compliant, lest they be treated like Anthropic has been,” he said. “On the other hand, it could lead more companies to avoid doing business with the government at all to avoid the risk of something like this happening to them.”

As some tech trailblazers in recent years have become more comfortable with developing weapons, Southern California has emerged as a hub for defense tech startups. With a long history in defense, it has the factories, engineers and aerospace expertise to turn venture funding and military demand into weapons, satellites and other advanced systems.

The fallout from Anthropic’s showdown with the Trump administration will help determine the local winners and losers in the sector in the coming years.

While many of the key players in tech have been reluctant to join the brawl in a high-profile manner, the positions on different sides are laid out in a court case that Anthropic has pursued to get off the Pentagon’s blacklist.

Anthropic filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California and a petition for review in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on March 9. The company is asking the court to overturn its designation as a “supply chain risk” and block the Trump administration from enforcing the government’s ban on its technology.

“The consequences of this case are enormous,” Anthropic’s lawsuit said. “The federal government retaliated against a leading frontier AI developer for adhering to its protected viewpoint on a subject of great public significance — AI safety and the limitations of its own AI models — in violation of the Constitution and laws of the United States.”

Some of Anthropic’s biggest concerns are that its technology could be used for government surveillance or autonomous weapons. It has been asking for assurances in the wording of its contracts that its AI would not be used for these purposes. While the government said it would not use the tech for those purposes, it was unable to provide Anthropic with the assurance it wanted.

Tech industry groups, Microsoft and workers from Google and OpenAI have backed Anthropic in its legal fight against the Trump administration, adding their own views to its case.

On Tuesday, lawyers for the U.S. government said in a court filing that the Defense Department started to wonder whether Anthropic could be trusted.

“Anthropic could attempt to disable its technology or preemptively alter the behavior of its model either before or during ongoing warfighting operations, if Anthropic — in its discretion — feels that its corporate ‘red lines’ are being crossed,” the government said in the filing.

The Department of Defense and Anthropic declined to comment.

The tech industry has a long, complicated history of working with the military. In the 1960s, the Department of Defense developed the internet’s predecessor, ARPAnet, to help keep military and government computers secure.

For much of this century, the big tech companies, as well as their investors, have often tried to avoid developing or promoting things that helped spy on people or kill them. Google, once known for its motto “Don’t Be Evil,” didn’t renew a controversial Pentagon contract, Project Maven, in 2018 after thousands of workers protested over concerns that AI would be used to analyze drone surveillance footage.

That has changed in recent years as there has been more money to be made in tech fixes for military problems.

Benjamin Lawrence, a senior lead analyst at CB Insights, said that advancements in AI and major events, such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, helped fuel a surge in venture capital investment in defense tech.

“It caused a huge shift with a lot of traditional investors looking at defense tech in a more positive light because you have a sovereign democratic nation that was invaded,” he said.

The world’s most powerful tech companies have been partnering with defense tech startups and securing government contracts.

Google has been offering AI tools to civilians and military personnel for unclassified work. The Department of Defense also awarded a $200-million contract to Google Public Sector, a division that works with government agencies and education institutions, to accelerate AI and cloud capabilities.

The industry’s allegiance with the White House and its military ambitions was strengthened with the arrival of the second Trump administration. Many of the top executives of the tech world have been supporting and advising Trump.

The recent strong-arming of one of the thought leaders of the AI revolution, however, has given many pause. Some of the resistance echoes the earlier era when the tech industry was suspicious of how governments would use its innovations.

The tech industry finds itself in a tricky spot after Anthropic’s clashes with the Pentagon. In late February, the public feud escalated after Trump assailed Anthropic and ordered government agencies to stop using its technology. His administration labeled Anthropic a “supply chain risk,” prompting the company to sue.

Trump’s actions could jeopardize hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts it has with private parties, according to Anthropic’s lawsuit. Federal agencies have started to cancel contracts.

Last week, tech industry groups such as TechNet, whose members include Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, Nvidia, Google and other major companies, said in an amicus brief that blacklisting an American company “engenders uncertainty throughout the broader industry.”

“Treating an American technology company as a foreign adversary, rather than an asset, has a chilling effect on U.S. innovation and further emboldens China’s efforts to export its own government-backed AI technology,” the brief said.

Microsoft has also backed Anthropic, urging the court to temporarily block Trump from blacklisting the AI company. Labeling Anthropic as a supply chain risk means that Microsoft and other government suppliers will have to use “significant resources” to determine how excluding Anthropic would affect their contracts.

The U.S. government said in its filing that its concerns with Anthropic focus on its conduct and are unrelated to its speech. But Anthropic and the tech industry say the move would hurt their businesses.

In addition to Trump’s harsh criticism of the company, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth accused Anthropic of delivering a “master class in arrogance and betrayal.”

Anduril’s founder, Palmer Luckey, backed the Pentagon’s position, stating that it should be elected officials, not corporate executives, making military decisions. Anthropic countered, stating in a blog post it “understands that the Department of War, not private companies, makes military decisions.”

As this battle plays out, some experts say Anthropic would probably have an upper hand in court.

In its lawsuit, Anthropic said the Trump administration violated a law for labeling a company a supply chain risk, noting it doesn’t have ties to a U.S. “adversary,” such as China or Iran.

Anthropic also said the Trump administration retaliated against the company for its speech and other protected activities, violating the 1st Amendment.

“They’re just lashing out,” said Rozenshtein of the University of Minnesota Law School. “I think that’s a lot of what this is.”

America’s beleaguered 1%, backed by their supporters in Congress, are pleading for your sympathy.

They say they’re treated unfairly by the federal tax code, you see, because inflation has sapped the value of their most cherished tax break, the preferential tax rate on capital gains. And they want it fixed.

Inflation, says Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), the leading proponent of this idea, has been “turning gains into an unfair tax burden.” Last year, he proposed to rectify this injustice via the Capital Gains Inflation Relief Act of 2025.

That was a rerun of similar bills he introduced in 2018 and 2021. None of them passed, so this time around, he’s proposing to circumvent Congress entirely by persuading President Trump to enact the break by presidential fiat.

The reaction by legal and economic experts outside the GOP echo chamber has been overwhelmingly negative. Whether Trump could enact the tax break via executive order is dubious , they say, and in any event the break is unwarranted and economically unwise.

“The argument proponents make,” wrote Steve Wamhoff of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy in 2019, “sounds logical until you think about it.” The legal and economic considerations haven’t changed since then.

As Wamhoff observed, there’s a certain amount of superficial logic underlying the argument that inflation in effect raises the tax rate charged on capital gains — the profits investors pocket from increases in the value of their stocks and bonds over time.

That’s because of how the gain is calculated. The math starts with the “basis,” the price originally paid for the asset, and proceeds to the final sale price. The difference is subject to the capital gains tax.

If the asset has been held for more than a year, the gain is taxed at a rate that tops out at 20%. This year, the rate is zero for taxpayers with income up to $48,350 ($96,700 for couples) and 15% for those with income up to $533,400 ($600,050 for couples). The top rate of 20% kicks in for those with incomes higher than that.

Gains on assets held for less than a year are taxed at the higher rates due on ordinary income, which this year top out at 37% on incomes over $640,600 ($768,700 for couples).

The issue raised by the proponents of change is that the basis is calculated on a pre-inflation value, but the gain on post-inflation values. Therefore, they assert, at least some of the gains reported by investors are due not to real advances in an asset’s value, but to inflation. They say no one should be taxed on inflation.

To illustrate, if you bought a share of stock for $5 a decade ago and then sold it for $9, your capital gain of $4 is subject to the tax. But if the value’s increase matched the inflation rate over that period, Wamhoff noted, “you have not genuinely profited.” Indeed, if your gain was less than the inflation rate, you might even be charged tax on an inflation-adjusted loss.

The remedy that Cruz proposes is to adjust the original basis for inflation. Say that due to inflation alone, that share of stock might have gained $3 in value. If one raises the basis by $3, the real taxable gain would be $1, not $4, quite a difference for the taxpayer.

There are a few problems with this narrative. Among the chief rationales for the lower tax rate on capital gains is to counter the effect of inflation. Adding the inflation indexing of the basis would mean accommodating inflation twice.

Another issue would be finding the right inflation index. Proponents of indexing typically cite the consumer price index, but that’s only one of numerous inflation measures the government calculates. Because the index tracks changes in the price of purchased goods, it’s not necessarily the right measure to adjust the values of capital assets such as stocks and bonds.

Then there’s the question of why only capital gains should be singled out for a special inflation adjustment. “Inflation distorts all forms of capital income and expense, not just capital gains,” observed Elena Patel of the Brookings Institution earlier this month. “Interest, dividends, rents: all of them partly reflect inflation.”

The impact of this change on the federal budget can’t be overlooked. The cost over 10 years, according to the Yale Budget Lab, would be $169 billion if the indexing rule were imposed only on newly purchased capital assets, but nearly $1 trillion if it were applied retrospectively to stocks and bonds already held by investors.

Also at issue is whether America’s rich really need another tax break. The tax cuts delivered by Republicans and Trump in 2017, during his first term, are estimated to be worth $1.5 trillion or more over 10 years. They were made permanent by the GOP budget bill enacted last year; the fiscal hawks at the Committee for a Responsible Budget estimate the cost of those provisions at more than $2.4 trillion over the next decade.

All that comes on top of a general reduction in top marginal federal income tax rates that have reduced them to the lowest level in a half-century.

As for the assertion by Cruz that inflation “will boost savings, spur investment, and create jobs nationwide,” there’s little evidence for that. Economists generally have calculated that whatever economic growth could be ascribed to the change would be washed out by the revenue loss from inflation-indexing only new purchases, and utterly swamped by the cost of indexing all holdings, past and future.

Nevertheless, Republicans have been relentless in trying to secure this tax break for their rich patrons. Legislation to enact the indexation of capital gains taxes was introduced in 1978, 1983, 1994, 1997 and 1998. Cruz introduced his own bills in 2018, 2021 and 2025.

All those efforts flopped in Congress. Accordingly, the advocates of inflation-indexing of capital gains have dusted off a workaround that first surfaced in 1992, during the George H. W. Bush administration. This is for the Treasury to rule on its own authority that “basis” means “inflation-adjusted cost.”

The Department of Justice and the Treasury subjected the question of whether the change could be made without congressional action to their gimlet-eyed scrutiny, and turned thumbs-down. “Not only did I not think we could, I did not think that a reasonable argument could be made to support that position,” then-Atty. Gen. William Barr said later. The Bush administration dropped the idea.

But Cruz, along with Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) have urged Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to revive it. Eight Republican lawmakers joined the parade, asserting in a March 5 letter that such a move would be “a straightforward administrative action grounded in fairness and sound tax policy.” (The Treasury Department didn’t respond to my request for comment.)

It should go without saying that with Democrats campaigning on an “affordability” platform, this idea sounds like political poison. It’s impossible to see it as anything other than a handout to the rich. How do we know this? Because it’s only the rich who have any significant exposure to the capital gains tax.

According to IRS data, about 75% of the income of the median American household, which earned about $84,000 in 2024, came from wages and only about 1.1% from capital gains. In the wealthiest households — those with $10 million or more in annual income— only about 12% came from wages but nearly half came from capital gains.

That may understate the value of capital gains for the wealthy. As Ed Kleinbard, the late taxation guru at USC, was fond of pointing out, the capital gains tax is our only truly voluntary tax. That’s because no one has to pay it until they sell the asset. If they hold it until their death, their heirs pay nothing, thanks to the “step-up” in basis for inherited wealth, which revalues the asset to its price as of the death of the owner, extinguishing the tax forever on what could be decades of gains.

After 48 years of unsuccessful politicking, one might be tempted to call the idea of indexing capital gains a certified washout. But when it comes to the GOP’s cherished hobby horses, it’s always too early to tell.

Bruce Bartlett, who served as an adviser to the Reagan and H. W. Bush administrations but has since become a most percipient critic of modern GOP economic nostrums, says the GOP’s peculiar genius is to keep even its unpopular policies simmering away in the expectation that, at some point in the future, a window will open up to get them enacted. That’s how they got abortion rights rescinded by the Supreme Court in 2022 — after 49 years of fighting against Roe vs. Wade.

When a GOP proposal fails to pass, Bartlett told me, “They put it on the shelf when the time isn’t right and when the situation changes they pull it off the shelf, dust it off, and they are ready to go again. … The left doesn’t do this. It waits until the political opportunity is ripe to even begin preparing. By the time they are ready, the opportunity has passed.”

The Republican fixation on relieving their rich patrons of the burden of capital gains taxes isn’t surprising. As I’ve reported in the past, the capital gains preference rate is the most valuable tax break the wealthy receive.

That’s because, in addition to being voluntary, as Kleinbard noted, it’s uncapped — unlike, say the deduction of mortgage interest.

This proposal doesn’t make sense even on its own terms. Isn’t it time for the proponents to drop the subject already?