The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Dialogue with Michael Knights: Houthi attacks in the Red Sea

Episode Date: January 24, 2024

US airstrikes don’t appear to be deterring Houthi rebels in the Red Sea. The Yemen-based militant group has continued their attacks on commercial ships in retaliation to the Israeli offensive against Hamas in Gaza. These violent clashes risk escalating an already tense situation in the Middle East, which in recent weeks has moved beyond Gaza into southern Lebanon, Pakistan, and parts of Iran and Iraq. So what, exactly, do the Houthis want? And how can the US and its allies successfully defend against Houthi attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea? For this we are joined by Michael Knights, one of the most sought after experts on the Gulf States, Yemen, and Iraq. As Michael explains, this battle of the Red Sea is much bigger than a few violent skirmishes, and if not managed properly has the potential to drag the whole region into war. SOURCES: AP, ABC News   The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths - @rudyardg.   Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].   To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 15+ year library of great debates in HD video, access to our Friday Focus podcast, a free Munk Debates book, and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ Senior Producer: Ricki Gurwitz Editor: Kieran LynchBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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New airstrikes against Houthi targets in Yemen carried out by the U.S. and the UK. Now, U.S. officials confirm the strikes just a short time ago saying that other countries are now providing support, making this again a multilateral operation. This is the second round of strikes carried out by the U.S. and the U.K. targeting the rebel group. Well, air strikes don't appear to be deterring the Houthi rebels in the Red Sea. The Yemen-based militant group have continued to attack commercial shipping in this vital international artery for trade and commerce in retaliation.

for Israel's offensive against Hamas and Gaza. These violent clashes are escalating an already tense regional situation in the Middle East, where in recent weeks, the conflict has moved beyond Gaza to parts of Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, and southern Lebanon. So what exactly do the Houthis want? And how can the United States and its allies successfully defend against the continuing Houthi attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea. For more on this important topic, we're joined by Michael Knights, a much sought-after expert on the Gulf states, Yemen, and Iraq. He's visited Yemen extensively. He knows the players in the region, and he has some terrific insights into this new front line that's opening up in the Middle East. How big could it get this conflict between the Houthis

and the Allied forces represented by the United States? What is the potential of the Houthis and their attacks on the Red Sea to drag the whole region into a war. Well, Michael Knights joins us now on the Monk Dialogues. Michael, welcome to the program. Thank you very much. Important conversation today about a piece of geography that is commanding global attention. We are seeing large-scale disruption of international shipping throughout the Straits, the Sea of Oman. This is causing an increasing Western-backed military response.

Let's begin with some basics, Michael, with the protagonists here. We know them as the Houthis. We don't know much beyond, frankly, their name in the Western press. Many of us are coming to this group anew, afresh. What do you think are some of the key facts, some of the key insights that we should take away to try to understand who the Houthis are, what they are bringing to this? conflict right now. Well, thanks for having me and you come to the right place. I've been looking at the Houthi movement and other elements of what we call the Iran threat network for much of the

last 20 years, including quite a bit of time in Yemen, including within the Houthi areas themselves. So I'll start by saying that the Houthis are one of the major power blocks within Yemen. and they're one of the two sides within Yemen civil war that claims to be the legitimate government of Yemen. And the Houthis happen to be holding the capital Sinar right now, and territories where they're about just over half of the population is located in the north of the country. The Houthis are a tribal movement who have gradually expanded using the same model that Lebanese as Bulla, used so that they could build larger and larger networks and expand their areas of control in northern Yemen until they finally took over the capital in a coup in September of 2014

evicting the UN-backed government at that time. And the Houthis are a pretty interesting movement. They are, first of all, they come from the same group of people who have run Yemen under the old imamate for most of the last 1,500 years, those people were replaced by the modern Republic of Yemen in the late 20th century, but they have wanted to come back and take over power again ever since that time in the 1960s. There are a caste-based movement, meaning that they believe as direct descendants of the Prophet, they are the only Yemenis who are fit to rule the country, So they're not exactly an open or inclusive movement and they're not very interested in democracy.

They're quite a brutal military yunter that rules largely with force and also through significant amount of propaganda and brainwashing. And, you know, they've been running the country since 2014. So if you're a young Yemeni 16-year-old fighter, the hoopoeuvre. Houthis took over when you were six. You can't really remember anything but them running the country using the same kind of propaganda techniques that Iran or Lebanese as Bullah would use. And now the Houthis essentially want to control all of Yemen. They probably can't militarily overrun the rest of the country that easily, including all of the oil and gas in the east. So they have to find another way to finance the part of Yemen that they now control. And that's going to happen

and probably through a Saudi-backed peace deal that is coming to completion, even as we're in this military crisis at this moment. Let's talk a little bit about the Saudis. There's a backstory here. The Houthis have successfully prosecuted a war now over a decade against the Saudis and UAE. What did they demonstrate?

Was it a question of tactics? Was it a willingness to suffer casualties, to allow their populations to be afflicted by all kinds of horrors, including mass food insecurity? What was it that allowed this seemingly upstart force to bring to heal to arguably the two of the Gulf region's most powerful states? Well, the Gulf Coalition, led by Saudi Arabia and with most of the military fighting power provided by the United Arab Emirates, we know obviously fighting the Houthis from 2015 until the ceasefires that began to take effect in 2020 to 2022. In some ways, the Houthis were beginning to lose terrain. They had almost lost access to the Red Sea coast from which they're undertaking all of these attacks on international shipping. And in 2018, they were getting close to becoming landlocked because of the successful offensives by the UAE and Yemeni forces in particular.

In many ways, it's more, I would say, the international community that saved the Houthis, rather than the Houthis military resilience. Because, you know, after the Khashoggi killing where Saudi agents murdered Jamal Khashoggi, and after the anger within the war, you know, in the US over tight connections between Gulf War families and the Trump administration, there was not a lot of sympathy for the Saudi and UAE position in Yemen when we came up to about the 2018 to 2020 period. And that's partly because, you know, it was seen internationally that Yemen was the world's worst humanitarian disaster and that perhaps the blockade on the Houthi

forces and the ongoing fighting were contributing to that possible famine that could come. Unfortunately, I think what that did was to essentially freeze the war. And the problem is, you know, sometimes when you're in the midst of a really bad humanitarian disaster, what you need to do is to end the conflict, not freeze it halfway through. And as a result, you know, we are still where we are today. So, I mean, the Houthis, they certainly have grown militarily. When I first encountered the Houthi movement in the mid-2000s, they were barely holding on to their home province in Sada, largely hiding in caves, using pretty basic weaponry, unable to even mount a serious insurgency against the Yemeni government, backed by the Saudis, in the same way that, for instance, Iraqi people or Afghan people were mounting a serious insurgency against the US. It was nothing near that kind of scale or lethality what the Houthis could do.

Now, by 2010, when the Houthis fought their first war, not only against the Yemeni government, but also actually actively, directly against the Saudi military, they had changed. They had received a good amount of training and equipment from Lebanese-Hizbullah and indirectly through Iran. And they had really begun to develop. Then we had the Arab Spring, and the Houthis got hold of. of a port on the Red Sea coast called Meadee, and that allowed the Iranians and Lebanese-Buller to directly resupply the Houthis and provide trainers.

And then from 2011 through to 2014, when they did the coup that took over the UN-backed government or replaced the UN-back government in Sannar, the capital, the Houthis had again strengthened through Iranian and Lebanese-Buller support and built on their own quite impressive ability to create tribal networks and alliances within northern Yemen, often through marriage, for instance.

And then from 2014 onwards, present war starting in 2015, a few months after the coup, the Houthis not only continued to receive Iranian lebanes as bull or resupply, but they made some very significant military strides. And to give one example, you know, when the coup happened in September of 2014, the Houthis could only throw a short-range, unguided rocket, maybe seven, ten kilometres.

Within about two years of that, they were able to throw a medium-range ballistic missile 1,000 kilometers at Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia. And obviously they didn't do that on their own. They used Iranian pattern ballistic missiles, guided systems that have been imported, and they turned into a whole different kind of beast. Now, 10 years later, they have a large military, including many tens of thousands of young Yemenis who have been indoctrinated their entire life. So they're starting to look more like a real Southern Hezbollah

with significant numbers of advanced rockets, cruise missiles, drones, drone boats, and pretty powerful ground forces too. Southern Hezbollah. I like that as a way of kind of thinking of analogs. Let's stay on history before we get to current events here. You've mentioned that Iran has played a key role in standing up the Houthis. What is the relationship there? My understanding is that, you know, religiously, the Houthis are not the same sect of kind of Shia Islam as the Iranian government. So talk to us a

little bit about how the Houthis, in fact, fit into both Iranian culture, religion, statecraft, and more importantly, I guess now it sounds like you're saying they are part of this of official access of resistance, they are now a proxy army for Iran. Is that correct? Well, it's always more complicated than that, right? But let me break it down for you a bit as I understand it. So the Houthis come from a broader religious community in northern Yemen called the Zadis. And these are, this is the principal religious group that formed that Imamate under an imam that ruled Yemen for so much the last 1,500 years. Now, the Houthis, and you know, there's Zadis, but even within the Zadi community in Yemen, there are many different

types. And it's true that the largest majority parts of the Zadhi community are not exactly like the, what we call 12a Shiite Muslims that you have in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Bahrain. There's instead of different kind of sort of Shiite Muslim, even though they have, you can't really characterize them exactly as that. But what really matters is that the Houthi family itself is not from that mainstream part of Zadism. They are from a part of the Zadhi community called the Jerudis. And they, if you will, are a much more narrow, radical element that actually do bear very significant similarities to the 12 Shiite Islam that's practiced in Iran, in Iraq, in Syria, sorry, in Lebanon and in Bahrain. And so, you know, as a result, a lot of people have said,

well, Zadis aren't like the Iranians, but that's not the point. The point is the small family system, which has grown and expanded its roots with Iranian and Lebanese as well as support, from the very beginning has signalled, we want to replicate what I have. happened in the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran and in the growth of Lebanesezbollah within Lebanese society. We want to do that here. And so what they did was to create a Zadi revivalist movement. So if you imagine, you know, these, this Zadi community in northern Yemen have been used to running Yemen for most of the last 1500 years. They get replaced by an upstart communist regime in the 1960s. And there's a yearning to be important.

again. The Houthis used that, and then they said, let's use the Lebanese as bullet tactics or the Iranian popular Basij tactics. It's like a popular movement within Iran that can mobilize large segments of society. They said, let's use those models and their various mechanisms like summer camps for children. Let's get into the schools. Let's have supervisors in all of the local municipal councils. And let's just ensure that we slowly turn the Zadi community to be more Gerudi and less traditional Zadi. And that's what they've been doing over the last, particularly last 10 years while they've been running essentially the core of the country, but also over the last 20 years as they've been expanding their area of physical control more and more. So,

So, you know, ideologically, they're very, very similar to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Iran or to Lebanese Hezbollah. They believe in transnational Shiite Islamic Revolution, which would overthrow the ruling powers within those countries, including now Yemen, which has really been successful. And they believe in following the religious example set by the Grand Ayatollah or the supreme leader in Iran. Now, a lot of people say, yeah, but the Houthis and Yemenis generally are a lot more independent than that. You know, they're not under the thumb of Iran, the same way that Lebanese-Hizthal might be, let's say, or some of the Iraqi militias. What I would say to that is this, the Houthis in many

ways are purer than Lebanese-Has-Bulah. When it comes to being a follower of the Islamic revolution in Iran, they're much purer than the Iraqi militias. who in many ways are pretty selfish and mercantile in how they use Iranian support and then try and ignore it if they don't like it. The Houthis would be very much capable of ignoring Iranian advice if they didn't agree with it completely. You know, the problem is that the Houthis, it's not that the Iranians tell them what to do or twist their arm behind their back to attack ships in the Red Sea or fire ballistic missiles and Israel. It's that the Houthis want to demonstrate that they are the purest member of the Axis of Resistance, more than Lebanese as Bullock,

more than the Iraqi militias, who'll be working with Iran for 40 years. They want to demonstrate they're next to Iran itself and their revolutionary guard. The Houthis want to do more to spread the Islamic revolution than anyone else. Sign up now for a complimentary monk membership. As a free monk member, you get all kinds of great perks and privileges, including streaming of select debates, dialogues, and podcasts on our website, a 24-hour advanced ticketing window to access seats to our in-person debates before the general public, written transcripts of all of our content, and email updates on special offers and promotions. You can grab your

complimentary monk membership right now at Triple W Monk Debates, that's MUNK, DebateswithanS.com. simply click on the membership tab in the top right of our navigation. Grab your monk membership and open your mind to a world of great debate. Okay, well, let's speed up the reel, so to speak, to where we find ourselves right now. Multiple allied airstrikes on various targets in Yemen, supposedly going after Houthi weapons caches, command and control structures. So far, it seems to be having some effect, but certainly maybe not the effect

that the Allies and the Biden administration, in particular, had hoped boats passing through the Red Sea and the CEO Oman continue to be targeted successfully by missiles and other weapons that are being thrown at them by the Houthis. What are we seeing right now? Is this a conflict that you can see a pace to, a cadence emerging over the future? What's happening?

When the US or Israel uses airstrikes against its regional enemies within the Iran threat network, they're typically dealing with an enemy that is quite sensitive to the pain. So, for instance, the US since 1980, when we tried to do the hostages, rescue has never done strikes inside mainland Iran. And the Iranians are very keen for it to stay that way, even though I think we are pretty close to seeing something going into Iran from the US. The Lebanesezbollah is also very sensitive to anything that could destabilize its control of Lebanon. You know, for instance, right now they don't want the Israelis to invade southern Lebanon the way they did in Gaza and a big eviction military operation in southern Lebanon.

They'd rather avoid that. The Iraqi militias, likewise, are very hesitant to call down attacks on their leaders who have got pampered individuals who enjoy the high life and enjoy being alive. So we're used to being able to use pretty small amounts of force or threats of force to keep our opponents within acceptable margins. And in this post-October 7th crisis, pretty much everyone has stayed within acceptable margins, including Iran itself, except for one player, the Houthis. And there's a reason for that.

Unlike all those other players, the Houthis have tremendous scar tissue. You know, if you remember the movie Rocky, he would block every punch with his face. The Houthis are something like that, honestly. They have been fighting for 20 years now against the Yemeni government backed by the Saudis. They have been fighting for the last nine or so years against the Saudi back government. And, you know, the Saudis primarily with all of their air power.

And they are not really scared of the Saudis, the Israelis, or the Americans and the Brits. Everyone knew going into this current series of strikes against the Houthis that it wasn't going to stop them doing shipping attacks. You know, I'm fairly well plugged in with the US government and its Yemen policy team. And nobody there had any expectations that this would point blank stop the Houthis. The problem is this, you know, when an international player starts to attack one of the world's most prolific shipping lanes and not just for oil, in fact, not primarily for oil, but for all of the consumer goods that need to be moved from east to west. That's not something that the US

could ignore. If you remember when the ever-given tanker got stuck in the Suez Canal sideways a little while ago, you know, it caused enormous economic impact. It was literally millions of dollars per minute. This is going on for longer and it's potentially open-ended. So, you know, the US, the Houthis say, we're not going to stop doing this until the Gaza war. stops because we're members of the Axis of resistance, and we're providing support to Hamas and the Palestinian people, more than all the other members of the Axis, by the way, the Houthis don't actually say, but that's really what they're pointing out. You know, the Houthis are the only ones who have globalized this conflict. Iran hasn't really helped Hamas. Lebanese has Bala hasn't

really helped Hamas, neither of the Iraqi militias. The Houthis are actually helping Hamas. They're saying, until that war's over, we don't, we're not going to let the Suez Canal reopen again. We're going send you all back to the 1840s before a Suez Canal existed. So, you know, they're having real impact. And honestly, they're on a high from that. They love the attention. They love being the toughest member of the Axis Resistance. So the prospect that a few airstrikes were going to back them off of that course of action was very unlikely. The reality is the Houthi is going to keep doing this to global shipping until we move to a sort of ceasefire phase in Gaza where international aid agencies and reconstruction contractors from the Gulf come in and where there's some

progressive resettlement of Palestinians from refugee camps back into parts of Gaza Strip. Only then can the Houthis say, we outlasted America and Israel. We didn't stop. None of their strikes deterred us because we are the toughest member of the Axis of Resistance. So, you know, you might ask, well, if everyone knew that, why did we bother doing any airstrikes at all? for one reason because sometimes you simply cannot do, you can't do nothing. You can't simply say, we are unable to control this teeny tiny actor in the Red Sea

and they've shut down the Sews Canal and America and Britain and all the other maritime powers are helpless to stop them. No, you're always going to impose a cost on a player like the Houthis if they do that. You hope a little bit that they might stop or slow down their actions, but you probably don't expect it. In that kind of case, what you're often doing is to take away capabilities. So, you know, in a lot of international repelage on these things, they say, you know, why did you do the strikes if you don't think the Houthi is going to stop? Well, because deterrence or compelence, forcing someone to change their actions is only one reason you use military force. Another reason

is what we call control-based strategies, which means you just literally take the tools away that the enemy is going to use to attack you. You can't dissuade them from attacking you, but you can make them less effective. And so what we've been doing is essentially to strip out as many of their anti-shipping missiles as we can find, as many of their long-range ballistic missiles that they've been firing at Saudi Arabia, the UAE,

more recently Israel. So we're actually doing some stuff that we've been wanting to do to the Houthis for a very long time. But, you know, the narrative of the Yemen war was that if you get involved, you cause famine. If you get involved, you must be on Mohammed bin Salman's side, MBS's side and the Saudi side, whereas this has caused the conflict in a different light. Now it's about maintaining global shipping. And so, you know, when we get in there and we say, well, we've got to do something,

while we're in there, why don't we do something useful? And that useful thing is to partially disarm the Houthis. Now, if we do this, what we've done to them so far, another two or three times, they're going to start to feel we have lost, we, the Houthis have lost as an organization, the things that make us special, our ability to hit Riyadh, to hit Riyadh, to hit Israel, our ability to hit tankers in the Red Sea. We're actually running out of those things, and the Americans are watching much closer and intercepting the resupplies that Iran is sending. So maybe we want to slow down. Now, really, it's just a race. You know, do the Houthis run out of stuff and do we run out of targets before the Gaza war moves to a new phase? That's really the game we're playing at the moment. Well, just to play this out a little bit, let's say the Israelis are correct and able to continue to prosecute a war in Gaza throughout 2024. We're seeing upwards of 40% of Suez shipping now being diverted around the Horn. of Africa to immense cost.

Are these timelines reconcilable? In other words, can the West, as you say, engage in this kind of tit for tat, reduce the capacity, the arsenal that the Houthis have? But at the same time, pay a real cost in terms of potential inflation threat that this all represents the principles that are being violated in terms of. the free and open navigation of the sea, does something have to give here? Or can we run this movie throughout 2024 with a few commercial breaks and a bag of popcorn along the way? Right. So, look, something probably has to give in Gaza. And I'm not saying that because

I'm calling for an immediate ceasefire. I'm saying that because there's only so much Gaza. And in particular, there's only so much Khan Yunis, the second major conurbation in Gaza, for the Israelis still to clear. So, you know, the Israelis don't think they're going to be going in Gaza for the rest of 2024. You know, they think they're going to be going probably for the next three weeks, maximum. So, you know, on the one hand, the plan is probably for Gaza to de-escalate significantly in February.

So we might be pretty close to the end. And if that's the case, if you're the Houthis, you're going to play it out to the end and you're going to keep going. Now, the big question then comes. does the end of Gaza main combat operations mean the end of the current crisis? And that's where we have to look at whether there could be a sequel operation inside Lebanon. The Israelis need Lebanese, as Buller, to back off from the border with Lebanon and Israel to allow around 100,000 Israelis to go and live in their settlements on the border on the border of Lebanon again.

The Israelis think they're not going to be able to convince people to do that unless they have signified. significantly backed off Hezbollah from the border. And so right now you have the US, French, the UN, the Israelis, everybody sort of trying to work with Lebanese-Sahzbollah, the Israelis bombing and diplomats doing their part, to say, listen, if we're going to end Gaza and there not be another war to follow, then, you know, we've got to see some movements on the Lebanese-Israeli border. And that is a big factor here, because the fact is the who's the... Houthis are at least as close to Lebanese as Bullah, their exact model and mentor as they are to the Iranians.

So if Lebanese-Bulah is in a knockdown, drag-out war with the Israelis, there's no way the Houthis are going to stop. In fact, they're going to accelerate. So, you know, we need to watch Lebanon very closely. But let's just presume for a second that Gaza ends in the middle spring. And let's presume that we don't have an immediate sequel operation by the Israelis into Lebanon. And I think that's likely because I think Israeli politics is going to get pretty lively after the Gaza operation ends. They're probably going to go into elections of their own and so on and so forth.

And there's probably going to be a gap in any military operations, I think. Well, then, you know, at that point, most likely the Houthi threat backs down. Now, you know, why? because it's not been cost-free for them to do what they've done since October the 7th. And they basically made their point. A culminating moment of success will come on the day that the rest of the axis of resistance, Lebanese-Bah, the Iraqi militias, the Iranians say, well, you know, we couldn't save Hamas, but we fought the whole way until the end of that operation.

Now the Arab states and everyone, the UN is saying there must be no more fighting, so we will not fight anymore, but one day we'll get Israel. You know, at that point, if the Houthis are the only ones who are still going at it hard, that's going to have seen a little odd even for the Iranians. So they'll pass their culminating moment of success. I think the Houthis will be quite keen to have a bit of a break after Gaza. But let's, you know, let's address your what if. You know, your what if posits that for whatever reason, this war does continue through 2024.

If that is the case, the US will continue striking in Yemen throughout 2024. And what we'll move to is a situation where, you know, we're simply hitting everything that tries to shoot at shipping. And that means we will gradually wear down their ability to threaten ships. You know, if they've got no helicopters, they can't board ships because their skiffs are not fast enough to chase ships. So we take out the helicopters, they can't board them anymore. We take out the ships and the drone boats. They can't even attempt to reach a ship. that's been stopped, let's say.

If we take out their anti-shipping missiles, they're not going to be able to ding the tankers very hard, if at all. We take out their ability to do mine laying, and they're only going to very rarely be able to lay mines in the Red Sea. So, you know, that's really where it's headed if the Houthis don't stop. If you remember in the 1980s, we did what we called Operation Ernest Will in the Gulf, where during the Iran-Iraq War,

the Iranians were at that point attacking international shipping in the Gulf, the oil tankers. And, you know, we did that for an old time. We did that as long as we needed to do it. So that's probably what will happen here if the Houthis don't stop when things in the Mediterranean calm down a bit. Final question. Will we be talking about the Houthis 10 years from now? Is this a movement and a piece of geography, which now we need to add to our kind of

of lexicon, our collective lexicon to understand, you know, risks that will pervade into this century. Absolutely. I mean, this has been critical geography ever since the Suez Canal was opened up. You know, it cut a new passage in the world. It created completely new trade lines, which is why, for instance, the port of Adam in southern Yemen, became the most busy poor in the world, even beyond New York City, right the way through till the 1940s. So, you know, this is absolutely critical geography, particularly when you think in terms of great power competition. You know, this is the place where China and, to some extent, Russia would love to have a base. The Soviets had bases in Yemen, from which they were going to base nuclear bombings. Everyone competed over being able to control Yemen back during the old Cold War,

So, you know, this is a critical piece of geography. And in the future, the Houthi movement will be something that we describe in the same way today we describe Lebedis Hezbollah or the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. I think in the future we'll look back and say, how come we didn't prevent that thing from forming in the first place? Because putting a southern Hezbollah on one of the most critical waterways in the world, the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, the Babel Mandeb, the Suez Canal, the Tehran Straits, which lead up to Israel's southern port of Alak, the Horn of Africa. You know, all of these places need to be protected. And that's now what the US Navy is doing every minute of every day. And we didn't want to be doing that.

We wanted to be protecting the Taiwan Straits. We wanted to be containing Russia. We didn't want to be containing a bunch of mountain men in Yemen. But because we didn't prevent that outcome from happening, We've allowed a southern pincar to Iran's crescent to fall. And now we have southern Hezbollah on the Indian Ocean. Michael, thank you for sharing your expert insights into the conflict. This is one we are going to continue to watch.

And thanks to your keen analysis, we have some new takeaways. I think that can help give us a better sense of what the risks are involved and what the things are to watch for in the days and weeks to come to see where this new front in a growing regional conflict in the Middle East is headed. Thank you very much for having me. Well, ladies and gentlemen, that wraps up today's dialogue. Again, let's thank our guest, Michael Knights, for giving us a lot to think about. If you have questions or feedback on what you've just heard on this or any of our podcast,

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Thank you again for listening.