Latest / John’s Newsletter / Enough with the sideshow: Trump should have taken the Iran deal

Transcript

Enough with the sideshow: Trump should have taken the Iran deal · John’s Newsletter

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  SPEAKER_00: Good morning,
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  SPEAKER_00: thank God I'm being pulled in a lot of directions because we're onboarding
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  SPEAKER_00: so many clients who do really care about actually getting it right.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: Thank God.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to be off to the States in November.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's a good time to be there to see what happens with the midterms.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: And rebuild from there in terms of realism.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: We're in very good shape.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: But we'll be gearing up, of course, for 2028 almost immediately and want to be involved in that.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: Onboarding clients and trying to influence the republic in a way
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: that suits its ethical, realist background that we laid out in Last Best Hope.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: But today I wanted to talk about a fairly unpopular thing to say.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: Not that that stops me.
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  SPEAKER_00: We long ago decided to play The ball and not the man.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: And Donald Trump should have taken the Iran deal.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's pretty self-explanatory.
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  SPEAKER_00: Iran offered a new ceasefire deal.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: The president did not take that and he really should have.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to go through the deal in a little detail as to why.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: I try not to go back to things that don't change.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: So I talk only about Europe when they say something ridiculous
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: because structurally little has changed since I wrote with Will Sherrano.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: My great friend, the EU is dead 20 years ago.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: I try not to go back to Ukraine because Russia continues to win ugly.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: Until that changes,
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: that trajectory or trend line changes, there's no point in bringing it up again.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: And on Iran, things have been, you know, on a course.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: The president,
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: to his credit,
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: refuses to put boots on the ground and invade a 3,000-year-old civilization the size
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: of Western Europe, which is what he'd have to do to secure the strait.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: Iran can't win because it's blockaded and its leadership decapitated.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: Economically, it's been nobbled.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: And so we have this sporadic,
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: low-intensity conflict that every once in a while fires up,
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: but nothing much is changing.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: The Iranians are content to hang in there, hope the midterms give the president a bloody nose.
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  SPEAKER_00: The president also looking past the midterms,
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: where again,
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: we think the House and Senate will go to the Democrats because he did fight
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: a forever war and prices went up as a result.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: So he violated basically two of the three tenants or two of the four.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: I suppose you could say closing the border is another tenant of Trumpism,
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: which he certainly kept.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: And then dealing with the tariff issue,
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: which he's also done to his best, although that's been messy and chaotic.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: But in terms of affordability and pricing for the Jacksonians,
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: I think he's let them down and fighting a stupid war of choice in the Middle East.
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  SPEAKER_00: The least of all places.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: He certainly let them down.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the reason.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, this is simple.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: People overcomplicate.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: What did Michael Burry said, who in the big short actually saw what was coming?
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: A sign of a society in decline is when they complicate the simple.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: Occam's razor.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: Analytically,
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  SPEAKER_00: most things can be broken down,
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: a la Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle, to a simple, explicable way.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: And this one is, he fought a stupid war of choice after promising not to.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: As a result, energy prices went up.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: Energy prices make every price go up.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: So we have inflation not at 2%,
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: but over 3%,
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  SPEAKER_00: not been tamed,
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  SPEAKER_00: and individual goods themselves going up a great deal,
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: as well as gas prices themselves.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: That's why he's doing badly.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't keep faith with his base.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's not that the Jacksonians are going to vote for the lunatics in the DSA.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: They're not.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: They'll stay home in the snow in November in an off-year election.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: Predictably, the Democrats are likely to overread their mandate, as they so often do.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: But there we are.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: That's another story for another day.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: The reason I haven't brought up Iran is very little has changed.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: But Trump had to get out of jail free card And I think he blew it
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: because he's looking ahead to what to do after the midterms.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: In a way, so are the Iranians when there could have been a deal struck now.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: It may well have been too late to save Donald Trump in the midterms.
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  SPEAKER_00: I don't think that's the reason to do the deal.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: I think the reason is to stop our preoccupation with a fourth order priority.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: As the NSS itself says,
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: the Middle East comes after our own hemisphere,
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: the Indo-Pacific, Europe, and then the Middle East, and then everything else.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: Fighting a war for a fourth order priority is not a good idea.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: And then expending weapons,
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: shooting them off like it's the 4th of July is even less a good idea
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  SPEAKER_00: when you're dealing with the Indo-Pacific,
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  SPEAKER_00: where in the future,
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  SPEAKER_00: all the risk and all the reward,
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: the The most booming economic area in the world and will remain so for
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: the foreseeable future into the long term and the place that has
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: a pure superpower competitor in China,
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: rising great power India,
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: great power Japan and a lot of other important countries like South Korea,
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: the ASEAN states, Australia, the Anglosphere, the whole thing.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: That's what we should be focused on, not fourth order wars.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, whoever the new president is,
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  SPEAKER_00: the first thing I'll say to them when asked,
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  SPEAKER_00: you know, this is like telling a little kid not to stick their tongue on a stove.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's ridiculously simple.
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  SPEAKER_00: After Iraq,
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: after Afghanistan,
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  SPEAKER_00: after Iran, don't fight a fourth war of choice in the Middle East.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: Don't stick your tongue on the stove.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: We really have to be that simplistic.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: But this was a get out of jail free card.
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  SPEAKER_00: And I wanted to go in detail a little bit.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's been rejected already.
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  SPEAKER_00: But here's what the Iranians offered.
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  SPEAKER_00: They offered a seven day, very quick timeline, very quick.
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  SPEAKER_00: And this is new to reopen the strait.
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  SPEAKER_00: And to restart talks about its nuclear program.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: So straight can be reopened.
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  SPEAKER_00: There's no doubt that economically blockading Iran has hurt them.
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  SPEAKER_00: None whatsoever.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: And to start re-talks on their nuclear program.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: This would have extricated the president from the Iran morass,
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: but it would have required him to make a number of concessions.
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  SPEAKER_00: First, he would have had to lift the freeze on Iranian assets.
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  SPEAKER_00: Totaling billions.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: Second, he would have had to permit Around to export its oil in effect to restart its economy.
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  SPEAKER_00: Third, he would have had to deal with the fact and this is really I think was
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: the deal breaker and it shouldn't have been.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: We've talked about Israel before.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: He would have had to order Bibi to end Israel's attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a ceasefire as the Iranians put it on all fronts.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Iranian delegation,
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  SPEAKER_00: by the way, met with Whitcoff in New York at the UN meetings of last week.
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  SPEAKER_00: And ahead of time, the Iranians did their homework.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: They got Oman and China on board.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: What is new in all this was the speed.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, there would be a new route in the strait.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: That Oman and Iran have worked out that primarily goes through Iranian waters.
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  SPEAKER_00: So a quick deal to open the strait and put a ceasefire in place in seven days,
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  SPEAKER_00: no time at all, but then a number of concessions.
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  SPEAKER_00: So let's start with that fact.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: Let's start at the broadest level and then dig through this briefly so
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: that you can see what a missed opportunity this is amidst all the noise.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: I'm
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: You do not get to claim unconditional surrender and the terms that go with that
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: unless you win a war unconditionally.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: Now, as a realist, this is, you know, a tautology.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: This is obvious.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: But to Americans, it's not.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: Americans I think the Habsburg Empire where they would fight these wars in
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: a rather stately fashion in the 18th century,
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: the 17th century and into the 19th century for 30 or 40 miles in either direction.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody expected to win an overwhelming victory and eradicate your opponent.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: But America has a tradition of that.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: All or nothing wars.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: Our revolution left us a separate country.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: That's a revolutionary change.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: The Civil War, the South in the end survived.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: I just finished, by the way.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: I did it.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: The monumental three-volume Shelby Foote, 3,000 pages.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: It took me a year in between reading everything else,
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: but I got through the great Iliad of Shelby Foote for a second time in my life.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: I doubt I'll do it again.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: I was incredibly moved to read that.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: Magisterial work.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: And if any of you find yourselves on a desert island or in prison and have the time, do read it.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's wonderful.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: But Unconditional Surrender for the South.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: The collapse in World War I of Wilhelmine, Germany.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: It ceased to exist as a polity.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: In World War II, the total decimation of both Japan and Germany.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: So Americans have this very strange political tradition,
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: the strategic tradition, where unconditional surrender is a real option.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: And unfortunately, I think that guides us to these utopian outcomes.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: You don't get to claim total victory unless you win total victory.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: And to put it mildly in Iran, it's a very unsatisfactory, non-total victory for anybody.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: Anybody,
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: you can argue the Iranians by seizing the strait,
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: making the threat strategically of that real, and merely surviving.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: In a Ho Chi Minh sort of way that they won the war.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: You certainly can argue that.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's what I think.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: You cannot argue that the United States has overwhelmingly marched into Tehran,
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: gotten rid of the government,
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: put a puppet government in its place,
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: abolished the Islamic Republic and now can dictate terms.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: And yet the neocons and even some Wilsonians in their crazy utopian way seem to think this.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: I was talking to my friend Jay a while back about Donald Rumsfeld,
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: and I have a sneaking affection for the old monster.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: Of the bunch of my tormentors in the Bush administration,
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: the Wolfman,
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: Paul Wolfowitz,
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: the odious Richard Pearl,
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: always wrong and arrogant to boot Richard Pearl,
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: the cheerleader Cheney, the worst of all, went from being a realist to a maniac.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: And really was driving this.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: The cheerleaders,
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: the Ann Applebombs,
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: the Max Boots,
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: the David Frums,
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: horrendous jackals, baying for blood and being wrong about literally everything.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: I had a sneaking soft spot forever.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: Donald Rumsfeld was an operator above everything else.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: And you could tell when he would talk that he was not on board
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: the nation building project in Iraq.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: He was simply trying to win the war.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: I probably liked of that horrible group.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: I probably was fondest of Rumsfeld because I thought he could see beneath some of
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: the nonsense and rolled his eyes at the appropriate moments.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: But Rumsfeld said a very important thing at one point, another tautology, but a funny one.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: When you're in a hole, stop digging.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: We have to see Iran for what it is and not what we want it to be and stop lying to ourselves.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: That's the worst thing to do of all in both life and foreign policy is to lie
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: to yourself is a thing you absolutely should not do.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: And often we are.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: And this absolutely has to stop and do it now.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: And as Remy said, when you're in a hole, stop digging.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: We are in a hole dealing with Iran.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: We absolutely are.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: And so let's take a deal,
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: an unhappy deal,
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: a less than perfect deal for a less than perfect strategic situation
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: that makes us stop digging the hole and gets us out of there so we can go back
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: to implementing the realist and correct NSS and NDS reorder the world for
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: the new era we live in on multipolar terms.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: That should be the goal.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: That's what we should be doing.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: So let's look at what they put forward in doing this.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: Iran offered a seven-day, very quick ceasefire to open the strait.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: That's what we get.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: So no energy price contusions anymore for the world.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: And to start talking about its nuclear program.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: Now, opening the strait is what we get from this.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: And to start talking about its nuclear program does not matter.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: Does not matter.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: Because we already took out its nuclear program.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: Again, I feel like I'm talking to five-year-olds.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: I'm embarrassed to tell you guys this.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: But because there's so much nonsense and noise out there, let me do so.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: We took out its nuclear program.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: The yellow cake is buried under rubble for the Iranians.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: They would then have to extrapolate.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: Extract these hundreds of pounds of yellow cake, put them in trucks, dressed in spacesuits.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: Again, we're not watching this.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: They would have to transport this to somewhere hidden underground.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: I assume, again, we're asleep.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: We're not watching this.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: Some sort of secure location that our bunker busters can't find and then take three
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: or so years,
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: three to five years to missilize the technology,
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: miniaturize the technology and have a nuclear weapon.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: This is ridiculous.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: This is not happening at all.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: Anytime in the near future, if it does, I'm all for striking them again.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: But that's not what's happening.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: So that we begin fruitless talks about the nuclear program might make us feel good.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: We'll amount to nothing, but we don't need to worry about it in realist terms.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: On the other hand, we get the straight open, huge carrot for the United States.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: Energy prices around the world go down.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: And guess what?
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: We get to leave.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: We get to stop digging in Rumsfeld's terms.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: That's what we get for doing it.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: So what are these difficult concessions?
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: The Iranians get their assets that have been frozen.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: That's going to be part of a deal all the way along.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody knows that.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: That's not giving up anything new.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: Two, they get to export their oil so their economy gets to exist.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: Well, obviously, that would be part of any deal.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: The thing that's different...
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: The only thing that's hard here,
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: in quotes,
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: is ordering Bibi to end Israel's attack on Hezbollah,
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: the very close ally,
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: where Iran does have ideological and emotional ties,
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: including new supreme leader, which Tabahameini does, to Hezbollah.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: As did his father.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: In the Shia Crescent,
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: they are closest to Hezbollah in terms of religion and in terms of strategy.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: And Israel has really knocked them back.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: So we would have to tell Bibi to stop doing this.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's in our interest now to work with the Lebanese government to try to stabilize
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: the place in America anyway.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: Our interests in Israel are not the same.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: They want this to go on ad infinitum.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: And we don't.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's a fact.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not picking on them in the hysterical emotionalism that has overcome people
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: in America about Israel.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: I'm merely in realist terms asserting a reality.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: Our interests, even among allies, do not line up 100% or they would be a state.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: They are not.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: They are merely a difficult ally that we agree with about half the time.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_00: When we agree, we should work together.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_00: When we don't, we should further American interests.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: Giving up this chit.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: That's true of any of our close allies.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: Japan, Britain, Germany, anybody.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_00: And Israel shouldn't be taken as more than they are,
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: but neither should they be taken as less than they are.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: That should not be a deal breaker for anybody.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so for giving that up, we're out.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: We're out.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, the new route through the strait goes primarily through Iranian waters,
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: but there's no mention in this of some sort of fee that you have to pay the Iranians
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: for this new route that's agreed to with Oman.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: I think this is incredibly important.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: Is that an ideal agreement?
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: Well, if we were marching through the streets of Tehran, no, it's not.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: Is it a livable agreement that,
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: as Rumsfeld says,
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: it lives up to the terms of the Rumsfeld rule,
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: we stop digging when we find ourselves in a hole.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: We extricate ourselves from this nonsense,
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: this madness,
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: and go back to implementing the entirely farsighted,
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: realist and correct NSS and NDS.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_00: And make the Middle East be a fourth order priority where we serve more and more as
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: an offshore balancer in line with it being a fourth order priority
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: and only intervene if somebody is going to run the table in the region
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: and no one is.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: Turkey, Israel,
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: Saudi and the Gulf states are more than enough right there
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: to not have any one country dominate the whole of the region.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: Israel, Turkey, Saudi and the Gulf states already.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: Plus Egypt as a half a significant power.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_00: So no one is about to run the table,
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: meaning we can adopt this position in line with the NSS if we stop digging.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: So let's put the shovel down and abide, ironically, by the Rumsfeld rule.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: Trump should have taken the deal.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks very much, everybody, and have a great day.