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Foreign.
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Welcome back, everybody, to what really Matters. I'm Jeremy Stern with you in Los Angeles. I'm here as always with Walter Russell Mead of tablet, the Wall Street Journal, Hudson Institute and the Hamilton School at the University of Florida. Let's start with this week's news. First story of the week, the Iran backed Houthis claim their first attack on commercial ships in recent months opening a new front in the US Iran war that has already disrupted global energy supplies and rattled bond markets. The militant group based in Yemen said it targeted two Saudi Arabian oil tankers in the Red Sea with missiles and drones. While it's unclear if the ships were damaged, the move could effectively close another maritime chokepoint vital to energy markets. Following Iran's shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz, some vessels are already avoiding the Bab El Mandeb Strait at the mouth of the Red Sea. With oil prices rising further, Brent crude jumped 3.8% on Thursday to almost $98 a barrel, taking its gains since July 10 around when the latest U. S. Iran flare up began to roughly 30%.
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Walter News Orfo News News I think there may be a little bit of panic over response to it. First of all, you can sail around the Cape of Good Hope. The Strait of Hormuz is closed. The Red Sea, even if it's closed, you can still take the long route around Africa so that, you know, the impact of that on prices is not quite the same. What it does do though is it closes the escape hatch that the Saudis were trying to open to be able to get oil out through oil and gas out through pipelines to the Red Sea and avoid the Strait of Hormuz that way. I think there are some interesting scenarios here though. If this goes on for any length of time, if you have a ship in the Red Sea, it's possible to think about the Suez Canal rather than the Strait moving into the Indian Ocean. So there are two doors into the Red Sea. And while the Suez Canal I don't think is set up for humongous supertankers, capitalism is a very, very inventive system. And over time something could happen. However, I think well before that timeframe, one would hope to have a military situation. And I can see that President Trump seems to be trying to build in some deterrence so to make the Iranians afraid that if the Houthis go crazy in the Red Sea, the United States will do more than that to Iran. How that will work we'll see. But it is certainly interesting that the the hoodies are back in the game. I think we could say that this marks the end of any, any ceasefire agreement that MOU really is. It's no longer pining for the fjords. It's dead.
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Remember back in the Biden administration, a lot of the administration's critics on the right and maybe elsewhere were, you know, the basic line on the Houthis was this is the small, primitive, ragtag band of terrorists whose survival was only possible because the Biden administration refused to do anything about them. But here we are a couple years later and it seems like there's still, you know, a player or maybe a tool in international politics that are capable of determining the course of certain, like, geopolitical events. What's, what's your, you know, kind of read on the Houthis at this point?
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Well, you know, they are certainly more capable than they were. There are all kinds of militias roaming around the Horn of Africa and so on that are, that are now fighting with weapons that didn't exist 25 years ago and that they certainly didn't have access to 10 years ago. So the technological enhancement of war, and therefore the war fighting capabilities of all kinds of groups continues inexorably to rise. This is one reason why kicking the can down the road in an era like ours can be a very, very costly strategy. Under the Biden administration, the U.S. was pushing both the Emiratis and the Saudis not to take on the Houthis. What would have the consequences of that been? It's hard to say. But certainly what we have now, you could hardly call that the outcome of successful foreign policy.
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Second story. Israel is sitting it out as the US conflict with Iran heats up again, a posture that suits Washington, its Arab allies, and for now, Israel itself. The the US and Israel fought together closely when they launched the war on Iran in February, drawing on each other's strengths in firepower, intelligence and logistics in an air campaign that had little precedent. Now the US and regional officials are concerned Israel's involvement would add a disruptive variable when they're trying to wring diplomatic concessions from Iran and avoid all out war. Washington has asked Israel to stay out of the fight for now. And the Persian Gulf's Arab states are lobbying the US to ensure that Israel does not resume strikes on Iran. They fear Israeli involvement would trigger a fierce response from Tehran that potentially targets their energy infrastructure and would also make it harder politically for Gulf states to join in the attacks on Iran themselves if necessary. Walter, news or foe? News.
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Look, there is some news there, but it's more like a sentence in A news article about something else. Yes, the United States, Israel and the Arab countries all think it is more useful for Israel not to be involved in this stage of the war than to have Israeli direct military and therefore Israel isn't doing it. This is hardly like earth shattering news flash to political scientists. Countries act in accordance with their perceived interests. But I think it is also a huge mistake to say that Israel isn't a factor in what's happening in the Middle east right now because the Israeli pressure on Hezbollah in Lebanon and the continued sort of very, very slow but interesting shift of Lebanon away from some kind of policy of endless appeasement of Hezbollah toward a, let us say, a slightly more muscular approach to this would not be possible without the Israelis. And that is Hezbollah is a lot more important to the Iranians than the Houthis are. And so Israel quietly ensuring that Iran is losing ground rather than gaining ground in Lebanon is a big factor in what else is happening across the Middle East. And not to be discounted.
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All right, final story of the week. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy fired the country's armed forces chief in a major reversal after initially siding with General Alexander Syri Syrsky in a row with a young defense minister closely associated with Ukraine's growing prowess in drone warfare. Zelenskyy announced his abrupt shift this week following days of street rallies after he removed Mykhailo Fedorov from the defense Ministry last week. Syrsky led the initial effort to protect Kyiv in February 2022 and oversaw Ukraine's invasion of Russia's Kursk Province, the first time a country had invaded Russian territory since World War II, but in recent months became entangled in a worsening conflict with the tech savvy Fedorov, whom Zelenskyy appointed defense minister in January and who quickly drew acclaim for the success of Ukraine's expanding drone campaign. Zelenskyy's decision to side with Syrsky and remove Fedora from his post last week sparked a wave of protests with thousands taking to the streets, leaving Zelenskyy with a political crisis. Walter, news or foe? News.
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You know, it's news from the HR department as much as anything else. That is to say, it reveals some interesting things. But you have military shakeups in war all the time. Look at the history of our civil war. Look at the infighting among allied generals over who gets to do what in connection with the Normandy invasion and so on and so forth. You know, what it tells us is first of all that Ukrainian democracy remains actually quite Vibrant. A lot of people will point to the fact that Ukraine isn't holding elections in the middle of the war and saying, well, you know, this is, you know, what do we have here? There's a lot of censorship and so on, what's going on. But what we see is that public opinion in Ukraine matters, that people who disagree with a government decision feel absolutely able to go out there on the street, make their feelings known, and the authorities listen. That feedback mechanism is probably helping rather than hurting Ukraine to make good decisions in the war. The conflict, so to speak, between the drone people and the regular army people is also partly a generational conflict. The older Ukrainian generals actually began, in many cases their careers as young officers in the Soviet Union. And in the early years of independence, Ukrainian military doctrine and psychology was still very Soviet. There's a sense in which this is not unlike what we're seeing, say, in the Democratic Party with the, the young stallions wanting to turf out the old guys. That's a part of it, but obviously here too, it's a question of priorities. What's going to happen with the drone war? And there is a real difficulty for the Ukrainians here because, okay, you've got these. Thanks to their prowess in drone fighting, they're really having more success against Russia than, than they've had in quite a while. But Syrski was responsible for some very important ground victories in the history of this campaign, of this war. And all the people who are constantly lecturing President Trump and Americans generally, air power alone doesn't win wars. You have to have ground troops. Okay? That's the conventional wisdom of a lot of people here who would instinctively say, you know, let's push those old Soviet style, old boring generals out and let's do hot, flashy, you know, drone war, okay? No, Ukraine is still going to need ground forces. And the advantage they enjoy right now in drone war is both limited in its, in its scope and perhaps has a sell by date on it as the Russians develop countermeasures, and by the way, as Russia continues to build up its ballistic missile capabilities. Ukraine is also even now experiencing a crisis in its ability to defend itself against aerial attacks. And we may soon get to a point where the balance in the air war seems to be tipping against Ukraine. So how in this situation does, you know, you think of Zelensky in here who's trying to figure out which group of people in his armed forces and his military establishment have the best understanding of this constantly changing wartime environment? How do you divide the limited resources that you have between ground forces, drone forces. That's not easy. And so you see Zelenskyy kind of trying to tap dance his way through it, or maybe in the Chinese expression, cross the river by feeling the stones.
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Where do you think Zelensky is by this point? On the kind of the Lincoln or the Churchill learning curve of hiring and firing the right generals, filling the cabinet with the right people, listening or not listening when, when you should. I mean, I know these things are so difficult and different, but where do you think he's been on that?
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He's got a kind of permanent Churchillian flair to him because of his brilliant, brave and successful actions at the start of the war, when more than any other single person, Zelensky prevented Putin from winning the war in the first week. You know, you can't take that away. When you add up the pluses and the minuses of the Zelenskyy administration, you can't go that. Also, he brings a certain unquestioned authority into these other debates. Beyond that, if you just look at the results, a smaller country is surviving against a larger country which is absolutely determined on its destruction. He has endured, the Ukrainians have endured savage attacks, often by superior forces with, he's facing, you know, up to what, a quarter or 20% of Ukraine's population may have fled as refugees. Against a background of demographic decline that is widespread in the region, Ukrainian economy is still functioning with an extremely fractious international coalition behind him with the United States sort of, you know, wavering and, and maneuvering. And sometimes Trump appears to be leaning toward Putin, sometimes toward Zelensky. With the European Union divided as usual, weak and irresolute as usual, Zelensky is managing to get the resources that he needs the, to fight the war that he encounters. And his armed forces, you know, the biggest Ukrainian failure was their big counteroffensive of a couple of years ago that just, you know, after much, you know, trumpeting in the press about, ah, really going to be the big punch, just miserably failed. Those, those generals aren't in charge right now any. And Ukrainian armed forces have reached a point of kind of technological innovation that the entire world is paying attention to their success. Zelensky must have been doing something right. You just can't say, oh, that idiot Zelensky. Without him we'd be in Moscow, you know, that that is not credible. So whether it's that he picks the right generals, picks the right cabinet officers, cannot really tell you. But what I would say is at the moment he looks like he may not know what he's doing, but he's a good guesser. Just one other thing that came to my mind that somebody once asked Napoleon, what quality did he value most in his generals? And Napoleon said, I like lucky generals. So maybe Zelensky is a lucky president and that's a good thing.
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All right, that does it for the news this week. Let's have the big conversation. Okay, Walter, so a very Trumpian turn of events here. So yesterday, Wednesday of This week, the US signed a 30 year, multi billion dollar nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia, enabling the sale of civilian use nuclear reactors to the kingdom and potentially opening the door to uranium enrichment on Saudi territory by American companies. Seemed like a big deal. And the US Energy Secretary and Saudi energy minister both signed the deal right before Chris Wright said he was going to be sent off to Congress for review. And then the very next day Thursday, Trump announced that he's added a new condition to the deal, which is Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords. The Saudis have made it clear, at least publicly going back to, you know, the Biden administration's efforts here, that there'll be no linkage between this kind of nuclear deal and recognition of Israel, at least without a Saudi approved path to a Palestinian state first. So, Walter, two questions. First for our listeners, maybe step back a second and explain why a Saudi nuclear program, even if only civilian for now, would be a kind of big deal in kind of, you know, post 1945 US foreign policy. And then secondly, just, you know, kind of parse what Trump is doing here this week. Is this chess? Is it chaos? Is it controlled chaos?
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Yeah. Well, the possibility of a Saudi US Nuclear deal got a lot of attention in the, in the press. And again, the brouhaha over this reminded me again of how naive the journalistic profession, or maybe editors are. The Saudis, over the years, they've sent foreign ministers to Iran, they've announced new partnerships with Iran. The Saudis are very changeable in the situation changes and Saudi foreign policy changes and it changes on a dime. And Donald Trump is, is famous for waking up every day and whatever he might have signed yesterday, today is today. So let's look at it. So people then were doing micro interpretations of every provision, just as they did with the MoU, the now utterly dead MoU between Iran and the United States. People were talking about, well, what does it mean in 5 years, 10 years, how does this change the entire geography of the Middle East? Give yourselves a break, people. These things come, they flare for all kinds of reasons. They appear, we will know over time, how this thing settles. When I hear about things like this, what I do is I try to understand, okay, why now and why this? Like, why did people in the Trump administration and people in Saudi Arabia agree that this was a good time to make this announcement? Regardless of the long term prospects of the deal? I suspect that, you know, again, shockingly, neither the Saudis nor the Trump people trust each other all that much, particularly signatures on a piece of paper. Trump is clearly preparing the way to escalate against Iran. Now, whether in fact he will escalate in Iran, you don't know. I don't know. Nobody knows. Probably President Trump himself doesn't really know. But the pieces coming together in the Middle east, you know, troops are coming, weapons are coming, supplies are coming. And again, the, the level of conflict is rising and the unresolved issues between the US And Iran are clearly at the fore. Now what we've been seeing are things like the Iranians have struck at oil desalinization facilities, I think in Kuwait. That is a huge wake up call for Iranian, for Saudis and everybody else. It suggests that this war has the potential to really explode into a much, much greater conflict than anything anybody has seen. Doesn't mean it's going to. But the Iranians are, are pointing their finger. Then if you add that the Houthis have been targeting Saudi ships in the Red Sea, the pressure is there. So I can see why the Trump administration would think under these circumstances, it made a lot of sense to at least appear to give the Saudis something that they have long wanted and been asking for. And on the Saudi side, I can see why they would see that this announcement would be, you know, if there's limited credibility to helps them, it's a show of American support at a time of crisis. It also suggests that the Saudis are using their leverage with the United States to get concessions that matter to them. Makes the Crown Prince look better to his people, and it makes the Iranians maybe worried that, you know, this really is serious and if we don't make some kind of a deal with Trump, we're really going to have a big problem on our, on our hands. So I see why everybody would want to do this. And we know that some of the folks in the Trump administration see the Abraham Accord getting Saudi into the great Abraham Accord. Certainly Bibi sees it this way as a great deliverable. One can also see why then this would be raised now, why the Americans went back on it. I, I, I suspect that Trump didn't fully take on board just how intense the blowback would be on this. There's a pro Israel blowback. Wait a minute. Are you, you know, you really going to help the Saudis get nuclear weapons? Because that's how this would be read and it would certainly encourage other Gulf countries. I can't imagine the Emiratis or for that matter the Turks, they're not a Gulf country, but they're there would be far behind if the Saudis were moving in this direction. So all of that kind of makes a certain sense. Everybody's moves are making sense even if the pattern, the course of events is somewhat chaotic. Going there and allowing and you know, facilitating civilian enrichment of nuclear weapons or sorry nuclear weapons, nuclear fuel in Saudi Arabia. So once it's not a huge step because under the non Proliferation Treaty, as the Iranians keep endlessly pointing out, you do have countries do have the right to do this. So in that sense is United States allows Saudi to exercise treaty rights is not as big a departure as you might think. I mean the npt, the non Proliferation Treaty is a lot more like a Swiss cheese in some ways than a great iron wall. There are lots of holes in it because the non nuclear countries wouldn't have signed it without, without various concessions and so on. But the US has tried to keep anything that could lead to proliferation in the Middle east the United States has, has tried to stop. And what is clear is that in the war with Iran, American resistance to that is, is diminishing. But overall there's a big question. Will the United States and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia remain deeply aligned in this new era in world history? And there are a lot of advantages that I think both sides would get for it. There's a reason both sides keep coming back to the idea of deepening our connection. And there are difficulties as well, of which Israel is one, but certainly not the only one. And overall, again I would look at this whole thing part of the United States and Saudi Arabia trying to figure out how deeply do we want to align ourselves, integrate ourselves, institutionalize a new kind of partnership in the post, post Cold War world.
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All right, that does it for the big conversation. Let's end on the tip of the week. Listener Elliot from Maryland writes in to ask what's been or will be on your summer reading docket this year, Walter.
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I've been working my way through a really good interesting book on history of the Holy Roman Empire, which perhaps some of our readers may wonder, well, why the heck would anybody do that? The Holy Roman Empire lasted about a thousand years and for most of that time it was the sort of leading political feature in Europe. It's an astonishingly interesting thing. So I'm reading this book, it's called the Heart of Europe. It's by a guy named Peter Wilson, classically German historians especially, but some others have written about why did the Holy Roman Empire fall, why was it worthless? And why did the failures of the Holy Roman Empire lead to Kaiser Wilhelm and Hitler in a sense. So, you know, it's been diagnosing the Holy Roman Empire as failed modernization, whatever. And this book takes to me the much more interesting, you know, well, how did it last a thousand years? That's not nothing. You know, in 1806 when basically it was blown away by Napoleon, was it still working? What was working? What was it like? What I find particularly interesting here is that a lot of German thinking, particularly about what the European Union is and should be, is actually grounded in all kinds of ways in what the Holy Roman Empire was. So, you know, the Holy Roman Empire had a lot had quite complex bureaucracies. It had legal proceedings in which states would sue each other or dynasties would sue each other. But there were also lots of different levels of members. It was an extremely complex system of rights and laws and checks and balances, if you will, and in many cases preserved a kind of liberty, certainly that was lost, say in autocratic France and obviously Russia. And this book for me has really helped illuminate the way that to a lot of central Europe, history should be going. It's a different sense of liberty and of checks and balances than has normally shaped American history. But I would also say that after the British, the Germans are the largest group immigrants that we've had historically in the United States. And you can actually see ways in which the political culture of the Holy Roman Empire has resonances and echoes in the way many Americans even now think about politics. So it's a. And it's a good read. So I would. So I'm enjoying it. I'm enjoying it.
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There you have it. Thanks to our producers Josh Cross and Ellie Axelrod. Thanks to Alex Fatanov at Hudson and my co host Walter Russell Mead. I'm Jeremy Stern. We'll see you next week and until then, please go rate and review us. This helps other people find the show.