---
title: "Middle East Roundtable: For Whom the Strait Tolls."
description: "Iran just torpedoed its own Hormuz deal, the US is quietly admitting it's out of missiles, and Saudi Arabia is somehow getting squeezed from three directions at once. Big week."
url: https://fronts.co/podcast/middle-east-roundtable-for-whom-the-strait-tolls.md
canonical: https://fronts.co/podcast/middle-east-roundtable-for-whom-the-strait-tolls/
datePublished: 2026-08-06T14:00:57.000Z
dateModified: 2026-08-06T14:00:58.000Z
author:
  - name: Fronts Staff
    url: https://fronts.co/authors/fronts-team/
publisher: Fronts
image: "https://media.fronts.co/cdn-cgi/image/width=1200,height=630,fit=cover,gravity=auto,quality=80,format=auto/images/articles/middle-east-roundtable-for-whom-the-strait-tolls-c2b4ef55.png"
type: NewsArticle
language: en
audio: https://media.fronts.co/audio/middle-east-roundtable-for-whom-the-strait-tolls.mp3
tokens: 14924
---

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Hello and welcome to the Middle East Roundtable at Fronts.co. This is Evan Maloney. I am here with Wilfred Miner, Africa Correspondent for Warfronts, Fronts.co and all other associated properties.

And Kyle Moran, Warfronts staff writer here. Quite a busy week so far, as always lately in the Middle East. Never a dull moment here.

So basically what's been going on is Strait of Hormuz naturally being the focal point of back and forth. Most kinetic action has been at a minimum, but certainly a lot going on behind the scenes as well. Various proposals coming out.

So about a week and a half ago, there was a deal being proposed by Oman for various different routes through Hormuz that was rejected by Iran. That's sort of back on the table. It has basically Iran coordinating traffic that would be flowing into the Persian Gulf, while the Omani side would feature all of the traffic heading out.

It only specifies apparently the first 60 days would not have tolls, which again is going to be the hang-up here. Iran very much pushing to have just complete tolls for in and out traffic, while the Gulf, U.S. wider international community pushing against any such tolls. And we have also seen for the first time in this conflict, a shipping vessel was sunk off of the Bab al-Mendeb, off the coast of Yemen.

I believe it was a cargo vessel this time. And this is certainly the first in this year that we've seen. I think it's probably the first since 2024, 2025.

But a lot to get to, gentlemen, today. So I'll hand it over to you. Gentlemen, before we go any farther, I have a bit of news from SEPA News, which is one of the official media agencies and news outlets endorsed by the Islamic Revolutionary God Corps, the IRGC.

They are saying, and you know, take this with a grain of salt, just might be a part of the negotiations more broadly, but I wanted to bring it to your attention before we move forward with any discussions of a deal, that Iran has announced the Strait of Hormuz agreement with Oman is hereby postponed over U.S. interference and Trump's threats, saying Iran will not conclude any agreement under the shadow of threats. Iran adds Trump is trying to claim credit for an agreement that is purely with Oman, stating that even with an agreement between Iran and Oman, the Strait of Hormuz will not open if the U.S. continues its violations, with reopening contingent upon a change in U.S. behavior and the correction of its violations. Iran adds that once opened, the Strait will operate under full sovereign authority with fees charged on every year. 젊 transiting ships.

So just a little bit more context that has just come into my desk as we were discussing this. Yeah. So that's very much in line with what I was thinking their response would be.

I thought they would perhaps continue negotiations a bit longer, but just for some background here, right before we started recording, we were discussing this and I was just wrapping up saying, I think they're just going to reject it. They had rejected a deal a week ago that basically did more or less a similar thing. They want full control.

They being the Iranians want full control over Hormuz with tolls in and out. That's not going to budge anytime soon, I don't think. So it's really going to come down to what type of deal can be reached along those lines if Iran is going to be willing to trade that for something else.

But as of right now, I don't I don't see that shifting much. No, neither do I. I think if Iran is willing to go to such great lengths to establish tolling control over the state, the strait now, I don't anticipate Iran being willing to kind of play this back and forth with the US.

I do think it's kind of interesting where we've seen the US do this a couple of times. Now, this was part of the original memorandum of understanding, according to most reports about this newest deal or this deal attempt. It's also been the case here where the US has only really been asking Iran to agree to a 60-day toll-free period.

After that, the MOU and what's mostly been reported about this deal seem to both leave it open-ended as to what Iran could do, meaning that probably at that point, with control of the strait, in all functional terms, Iran could impose tolls as it sees fit. So first off, what do you make of that consistent frame from the US where it's not a complete prohibition on an Iranian tolling, it's just a not for 60 days? And what do you make of Iran's unwillingness to even wait that long?

I think any attempts by the US to push this out to 60 days are nothing more than just kicking the can down the road, because 60 days will come up again. America's strategic position won't change within those 60 days. It doesn't want any tolls to be implemented on the Strait of Homo.

And I keep coming back to the simple fact that on the 27th of Feb, just before this war began, ships were passing through the Strait of Homo without paying any tolls. The Strait was open for business. Anyone could access it.

The Strait is only closed as a response to American aggression, the fact that America and Israel launched this war first. So I think it's a strategic mistake. One, we've discussed this ad nauseum, the fact that the war was launched in the first place, but it's a strategic mistake to keep pushing the can down. the road the u.s needs to fundamentally decide whether or not it's going to allow iran to have control over the straits no more you know 60 days 60 days or just make up their mind on how they're going to reopen it yeah i basically agree so the thinking here being that and i sort of understand where washington's head is at when it comes to this it's thinking is okay if you can get a 60 day thing at least immediate pressure is off and then you can work on figuring out what the hell comes after down the road but at this point i mean we're in month six of this thing it's pretty clear that this is a issue that's not going to be resolved anytime soon so when it comes to the big question which is hormones we just sort of have to deal with it head on and i think that this attempt at getting like 60 day extensions is just sort of not really productive anymore we even saw this during the mou because the underlying issues weren't resolved the thing just collapsed and i don't see any future halfway deal limited term one going any differently so let's talk about that then this idea that the u.s kind of is just kicking the can as it's been doing that doesn't really seem to be changing as of now right we saw a cnn report this week which is an interesting read if you have a chance to read it basically cnn is claiming that they got their hands on an email that centcom circulated from an intelligence officer basically asking a very broad pool of military analysts and other contributors for just any ideas that they have to move the needle at this point which is kind of the clearest indicator that we've seen yet if this is all true of something that we've suspected for a bit which is to say that the u.s is running up on limitations of its air power and we have more information on this that we're going to get to in just a moment but kind of on its on its face it seems as if the u.s has started to recognize at least privately and internally that it does not have the means to really shake up this conflict and create a dynamic change of circumstance but the response at this point seems to just be more can kicking so what do you both make of that and is there a better path forward for the u.s that you see like what needs to happen here in order to get out of this cycle that we seem to be stuck in so gentlemen i have a question before we go any further did either of you receive the email i unfortunately did not i did none i was not in the i was not in the group chat on this one unfortunately i am not on the email list either although i do have a piece coming out on fronts for a strategy that basically the international community is the international community's best shot at sustaining free flows of shipping throughout hormuz but i don't know whether that'll get over to the pentagon so i'm asking because from what from what we've seen of the email publicly, it seems like a very, very interesting request.

And allow me to quote briefly from the CNN report, we are looking for new, creative and unconventional ways to pressure and punish Iran. And to Evan's point, it seems like, yes, the US has reached the limits of what conventional air power can do. And we've been toying around with the idea of a video for why pure air campaigns always seem to fail.

Hopefully, at some point, we'll get to working on it. But America has a lot of air power. That is undisputed, without any question.

But air power can only go so far. And the existence of this email is just a little concerning because what kind of responses are coming through? I'm asking that because there was a report earlier today that the US is considering changing its nuclear doctrine to allow for the use of small scale tactical nuclear weapons.

And I'm not saying that the US is going to use small scale tactical nukes in Iran. But it's a very weird coincidence, the timing on this. But I don't think the US has any alternative beyond either go full force ground invasion with all of the political costs that come with that, with all of the costs that come with, you know, seeing Americans get targeted constantly by FPV drones, and what that will do for the Republicans' electoral chances in the midterm and beyond, or find a deal that will still be politically costly, but won't cost American lives.

Yeah, so basically, it does show that the US is running out of ideas here. I mean, it is certainly creative. And I'm hoping that we can go with something that doesn't involve anything using nuclear weapons.

But ultimately, like this tactical nuclear situation, the fact that's even being discussed, and we should clarify here, we're talking tactical nukes, which is even that is not being like super seriously floated. But it is something that have has been in discussions a bit more than I would like to see, which is zero in recent weeks. So it's something to definitely keep an eye on, but not something I'm too, too alarmed at.

Ultimately, I do think we're basically just sort of like, well, this isn't working, what else we got? So we'll see if anything can fully shift. Again, I don't necessarily think that's enormously likely to be the case, but we're going to have to just sort of see where the Pentagon goes from here.

Yeah, I think it is worth noting as well that it's not necessarily a terrible thing, right? It's not the end of the world that the US would be L L L L L L All right. asking junior officers and analysts and all those other folks for ideas, right? That's arguably the sign of like a healthy military that can listen to people who aren't directly in the chain of command when they have good ideas, things to share, right?

That's less of the issue here. It is more a matter of timing. It's a matter of the fact that this is being asked now at a time when the U.S. has pretty visibly run out of options to really change the game in Iran.

That other than, you know, again, I hate to keep on bringing this up, but it's kind of the threshold that exists just because of the limitations of what's in America's arsenal. There are very few tools left at the U S's disposal, other than tactical nuclear weapons and strikes on desalination infrastructure and like really, really inflammatory steps that you could use during an air campaign to change this situation at all. And I do want to bring in another report from Reuters.

Here's this one talking about the level to which the U S has purportedly, according to Reuters sources run through it's it's long range weapons. So the biggest issue in this report are the army tactical missile systems known as the TACMs and the precision strike missile that replaced it, which is the PRISM. So the PRISM is a newer system.

I don't think we need to talk about that all that much. It just went into full-scale progression last year. So there was never really much of a stockpile here to begin with.

So to say that it's the U S has gone through its PRISM stocks is not necessarily a surprise. It's not the end of the world. The ATACMs is a much larger issue.

So according to two sources from Reuters, the U S has used quote, virtually all of its ATACMs and PRISM missiles. These are expensive hardware. They are about a million dollars a piece.

They take time to produce. They take time to replenish especially the PRISM, which is again, just entered full-scale production and did not exist in large stockpiles before this. ATACMs have also been sent off to Ukraine.

They are very important to the U S in deterring China and deterring Russia. These are really important weapon systems and it sounds as if the U S has kind of exhausted its stockpiles here, which is seriously concerning. So what do you both make of that?

So from very early on, it seemed that the Trump administration believed this war would last a much, much shorter time than it has. That's why we are seeing them, well, we saw them rather use up so many of the stockpiles that they had so many of these high, high tech precision missiles, high tech systems, because they didn't think the stockpiles will have run out as fast as they have. And, you know, the war wouldn't have dragged out as long as it has.

So I think, again, it boils down to that strategic misunderstanding that the U S had of Iran that this belief that they could launch decapitation strikes, take out the head of. the head of the Iranian government, Ayatollah Ali Khomeini, and that the entire Iranian establishment would crumble in upon itself like a house of cards. That strategic misunderstanding is why we're looking at a situation where all of these stockpiles are basically running out. And I have a video coming out on how the lack of American interceptors is going to affect Ukraine.

But suffice it to say, Ukraine is not safe because of this. American allies in places like the Indo-Pacific are not safe because of this. And America's ability to deter China has gone down significantly.

One of the biggest issues in a possible war between the US and China would have been just how big an industrial base China has, the capability and the capacity to produce missiles and interceptors at such a large degree compared to the US having to produce them in batches and they're very expensive and all that. But when we were looking at those numbers before the Iran war, the US still at the very least had stockpiles of interceptors. Now it doesn't.

So the calculus has shifted even in a greater degree in China's direction. So yeah, this is such a huge strategic failure. So something I messaged a friend of mine a month or so ago is that the ultimate conclusion here is the United States literally launched this thing without a single backup plan in case taking out Khomeini and the other top guys didn't work without any risk assessment on US munitions, stockpiles and resupply capabilities and without any assessment of what would happen in Hormuz.

So that is certainly not the backdrop which I thought the war would be launched at. I would have imagined they would have done more planning than that, but apparently very much mistaken on that part from me. But like moving forward here, I don't really know how, like the US is in a situation where it cannot afford to keep fighting this war with such advanced missile systems and interceptors.

Ukraine recently under more missile attacks from Russia because of lack of patriots. So Ukraine has mastered counter drone techniques, but Russia knows how short they are in the international community is on patriot interceptors. So certainly going to be an issue.

The US is in the process of scaling up patriot production as well as other production, but we're still burning through them faster than we're making them, which is the issue. And I don't see that resolving anytime soon until the Iran conflict is fully wrapped up. I do think that the Operation Epic Reload that we've talked about in past episodes is going to... to... become a thing at even more urgent levels because at this point it's approaching like national emergency territory where i think like invoking the and there's a ability that the president can invoke by basically compelling companies to manufacture certain things for national security and i think we will see more of that take place the u.s has a reasonable industrial base from which it can pivot but it takes time to spool all of that up and convert things to be actually making the interceptors so i definitely think we're going to be seeing more of that in the months to come so kyle this is something i've been thinking about more frequently do you think the u.s will give out the license to produce some of these interceptors to take advantage of the fact that some of its allies have a really good industrial base that can be scaled up to help relieve some of this pressure on the u.s systems it should whether or not it will is a separate question so we were talking about doing it with ukraine i think we should but that's been stalled for reasons that escape me so i think it's the defense production act that the president can invoke that basically compels private industry to manufacture military related things for national security reasons so ultimately i do think that we will see some of that and by all means if ukraine can start pumping these out as well i mean we are at the stage where we no longer have the luxury of saying actually i don't think we really want them making that half of the world runs on these things and we've adjusted to the point where it's like where sophisticated air defense systems is sort of like the default expectation where if somebody is launching missiles at heavily populated cities the expectation is okay those guys have counter missiles that go up and in if somebody launches 20 missiles at a city okay maybe one of them gets through or two of them get through but the rest get shot down so we've seen this throughout the iran war even though there has been certainly damage throughout the gulf extensive damage this is a tiny fraction actually landing of what's been launched so i mean like the international community being so reliant on this is going to it's certainly in their interest to also be producing them and an opportunity for washington to be leasing allowing them to produce some under lease for sure yeah one thing that's been really interesting for me is watching how countries around the world are reacting to the realization that maybe we won't have american stockpiles for as long as we thought we would south korea navy has begun phasing out the u.s air defense missiles opting to go for locally developed KSAM2s, which South Korean military bloggers are pushing as a superior option.

And we obviously can't compare because we don't have the technical specifications of all these systems. But for me, it's interesting seeing all of these countries, what direction they're choosing to go in. I think this is also a welcome relief point because the current status quo is just inherently unsustainable to me, where it's like Washington produces these like a few systems that the entire world is dependent on for air defense.

That was very much a relic of the late Cold War. So Patriot State back, I think, many, many decades. But really, they've caught on throughout the wider world ever since the late Cold War period.

But moving beyond that, I mean, it's not sustainable for Washington, given how slow it is to actually manufacture these things, to be producing them for the entire alliance or all of its allies here. So I think that if we're in a situation where certainly South Korea is very good at being able to produce things under license, it's done this with many different areas. And Europe has also been developing some air defense systems as well, excuse me, Italy has been in the process of this as well as France.

So I certainly welcome any developments on that front. I really think that just given the like Cold War and post-Cold War sort of like sole global power role that the U.S. had at that point, that's sort of how we got into this place. But I think it's a healthy development to see more development going on elsewhere as well.

Yeah, I do want to echo that. And props to South Korea as well, which has a really robust and rapidly developing military defense industry. Shout out to a lot of countries here, right?

Ukraine also very much included. Countries that are really stepping up and working overtime to expand production to the degree that they can. That being said, and as much as I think we would all like to see export and licensing agreements for these air defense systems elsewhere, right?

To sustain patriots, sustain pads wherever they can. And then also to invest in the development and design of new systems. Even with that, right, it's important to really, really emphasize these are fixes in the sense of multiple years, right?

It takes a very long time to start up and get a production line going at full capacity. It takes much longer to design an alternative missile system or interceptor system. These are steps that can help to hopefully deter future conflicts 5, 10, 15 years down the line.

Their impact on this war now is going to be pretty much negligible. That's also the case for what was it, Operation Epic Reload, which is hard to say with a straight face, but here we are. Yes, that may lead to production lines opening sooner than later, but it's still several months down the road that those lines would even be open and available.

So in the short term, where the U.S. has burned through so much of its stockpile and also cut into what was expected to be global deliveries to the rest of the world, to the U.S. and its allies, there is obviously a short-term risk where countries like China, countries like Russia have an opportunity for some real immediate escalation here. I saw something on X the other day that I do want to shout out. I don't know how true this is in a purely like nuts and bolts standpoint, but it was an interesting thought.

It would be tough for the ultimate pacifist to find a way to get rid of U.S. munitions and stockpiles faster than this war has. This has been a really incredible expenditure rate in a way where I have to assume if you were a military planner in Moscow or in Beijing, you must be fairly pleased with what's happening now, right? Because it does create this short-term window where if, say, China were to start working toward an invasion of Taiwan tomorrow, in which China can leverage drones and missiles on a scale 10 times what Iran can against systems that are already known to be somewhat depleted, it's difficult to see a way in which that doesn't end with, at the very least, mass destruction on Taiwan and against forces that try to intervene, U.S. or otherwise.

So in the short term, do both of you expect that we should be starting to think about and anticipate expansions of other global conflicts where this U.S. interceptor shortage is a short-term opportunity for other adversarial nations across the globe, or do you think that's overblown? I think, for me, the biggest risk actor to look at in that sense is Russia. I don't think China is going to invade Taiwan at any point soon.

I don't think they're going to make good on any of their aggressive actions in the East China Sea, the South China Sea, because the current situation really, really favours China. China gets to come across as the more competent world power simply because it's, one, it saved the world from a massive, massive energy shock, and two, it's been one of the countries who are behind the scenes really pushing Iran to negotiate. So China gets to come across as a really competent international power while watching the U.S. pace away its credibility, pardon my French.

So for China, the situation as is really favours them a lot. And obviously, it's getting a lot of targeting information, a lot of information about the operational capabilities of the American military from Iran. And any time that Iran is able to destroy a military base in like Jordan or we can...

I don't think about it. I don't think about it. America's capacity to conduct recon operations by destroying a radar base, all of this is good for China.

So on China's end, I don't think they're really, really planning anything. But from Russia's point of view, America's weakness is NATO's weakness. And we've discussed ad nauseam as well, just how much Russia is likely to test the NATO alliance right now by maybe see an invasion into Poland or one of those regions that are Russian enclaves, and Russia can claim that its Russian-speaking population is being discriminated against.

If Russia chooses to test NATO now, when American interceptors are low, when America's willingness to engage in foreign conflicts is low, it's going to be catastrophic. Yeah, I'm similarly skeptical that China would move in on Taiwan during this, because on some level, it would be understandable, right, because there's so much going on. It sort of lowers the cost barrier, if you will.

But I do think that there's more to that than meets the eye, because China is basically able to sit back and while doing absolutely nothing, basically just, the thing is, like, don't interrupt your enemy when he's making a mistake, right? So there is that, and going for Taiwan would be the complete opposite of that. The problem being that the more hardliners in Beijing are so gung-ho on reunification with Taiwan, it may not be, they may not be able to resist the temptation.

Taiwan looking mighty good in the last few weeks, if you will, from the view in Beijing. But ultimately, I am pretty skeptical that they'd go for that. There was an article in Foreign Affairs that was actually making this case as well.

Professor Robert Pape from the University of Chicago, he was basically arguing that the U.S. basically getting bogged down in Hormuz and with Iran from its air campaign and naval campaign underscores the risks of actually moving in on Taiwan, what that would entail and what China would have to be willing to pay for that, both in the short, medium and long term. And right now, nothing would sort of unravel or risk unraveling China's image more than first just invading a semi-sovereign country, if we're being honest, that clearly has, wants nothing to do with anything like that, and also would extend to them the same risks of getting bogged down in the way that the U.S. is also bogged down. And so in that situation, you'd wind up with the three big powers, if you will, you'd have Russia. bogged down in Ukraine.

You'd have China bogged down in Taiwan. You'd have the U.S. bogged down in Iran. That starts to look pretty, pretty scary.

But I still think it's more likely than not that China ultimately does not go for that. And let's take a pivot to the Red Sea now and bring in another country to this conflict, Saudi Arabia. So over the last week, we have seen numerous Houthi strikes in what the Yemenish Houthi rebels are calling a blockade of Saudi Arabia.

Now, the Houthis have been fairly clear so far, rhetorically at least, that they are not trying to frame this as a blockade of the Balbam and Dem Strait, which is the southern entrance to the Red Sea, which is of course in itself a really, really vital shipping way. Instead, they essentially are claiming that they are pressuring Saudi Arabia specifically for some reasons that have to do with this war, some reasons that are more tangential. That's a longer conversation that we can get into in due time.

Over the last week or so, we have seen reports that the Houthis have collaborated with Iran-backed proxy militias in Iraq to essentially attack Saudi Arabia from the north and the south. We've seen attacks targeting the Red Sea export facility of Yandu, which is Saudi Arabia's main export hub outside of the Persian Gulf. We've seen the Houthis target the east-west pipeline, which runs across Saudi Arabia and gets oil to that port.

We've seen attacks on numerous Saudi shipping vessels, including one that was sunk in the last 24 hours before this episode was released. We've also seen a couple of dozen now, I believe, Saudi tankers change course to essentially go down around Africa, come through the Mediterranean, and then come south through Egypt's Suez Canal to reach Saudi Arabia to reach these ports instead of risking transit right by Yemeni shores, which is much more expensive, vastly more expensive, and underscores how seriously Saudi Arabia is taking this threat in which they've been seemingly kind of encircled because there's a threat coming from Iran across the Persian Gulf. There's a threat from the south in Yemen.

There's a threat from the north in Iraq. So what do you make of Saudi Arabia's situation, their reaction to it? Yeah.

So, I mean, Saudi Arabia in general is just in a very unenviable position, which is such an interesting development because earlier throughout most of the conflict, it was the geographically blessed location in the Middle East. So they were able to export oil despite the relative closure of Hormuz. They were able to pipe it to Yanbu on the west and ship it out both north through Suez and south through the Babel Mendeb.

So now they're caught in the worst of both worlds. They have a blockade on their southwest port heading out through Babel Mendeb. And again, we saw that sinking of a ship for the first time since at least 2025, possibly 2024 off that coast, while also having to contend with what's going on in Hormuz. still leave Suez to the north.

So if they're shipping to Europe, North Africa, and the Americas, then that would be one viable option. But again, Suez is hardly a full alternative. First, you're down two out of three, which is certainly not sustainable.

Any shipping that goes through Hormuz, excuse me, through Babel Mendeb, would have to be routed up through Suez to go through the Mediterranean and then all the way around the continent of Africa, which adds weeks to any journey, which is both more expensive, more timely, etc. So that's certainly even more pressure on the international energy market. The Houthis have been unsuccessful at putting an Iran-level blockade so far. They have attacked several ships.

They've also attacked Yanbu itself, and they have attacked the refinery at Gizan, which was forced to shut down for, I think it's fully back online, if not fully, then at least partially. But it was shut down for several days at least. So certainly under a lot of pressure.

And Suez, by the way, even if they were able to ship all the way through it, you have to have a special type of ship. It's too shallow to take what's called the very large cargo containers. So they designed this own version called the Suez Max.

And I just, as a Gen Z person myself, I just could not help. But in my episode on that said, look, even if we are Suez Maxing, it's still not going to be able to fully deliver on what Babel Mendeb and Hormuz was delivering. Not even close.

Even if, like you said, even if we were able to Suez Max to the Max, it's incomparable to the amount of oil that was flowing through the Babel Mendeb and the Strait of Hormuz put together. Because if the Suez Canal was a genuine alternative, and you know, not just an alternative that's been pushed onto Saudi Arabia because of the strikes by the Houthis and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, oil would have been passing through there by now. It's not an option because everyone wants their oil as cheap as possible and as quickly as possible.

If you were looking at adding days, weeks even, to a trip and making it more expensive, then it's not worth the squeeze. So this raises another interesting question in my head. There have been so many bypass routes proposed for the Strait of Hormuz.

Do you guys see them as being effective? Even putting aside the question of the Houthis and all the violence that comes with that, do you see these bypass routes as being an effective idea, an effective solution to the situation in Hormuz and the Babel Mendeb Strait? I would say in a long-term sense, they're critical, right?

The idea That the world would choose, would opt into being fully dependent on the Strait of Hormuz if it didn't have to, right, is, again, one of those kind of late Cold War, post-Cold War things where, you know, the world is done with major wars. We're not doing, you know, what have you anymore. That has been proven really just completely and demonstrably false over the last few years.

So in the sense that there hadn't been major infrastructural investment other than, say, the East West Pipeline in Saudi Arabia, the Port of Fujairah and the Emirates, right, a few standout cases, right? But other than that, this has not been a huge priority for any of these nations or for the international community. That was an oversight, and that could and should be corrected in the long term.

In the short term, it's much more difficult to, for the same reasons we've been talking about, the missile interceptor production. It's much, much harder to point to these large-scale development and infrastructural projects that have a much longer timeline and say, this is a solution that solves our problem now, right? There is not time to build new pipelines going off in different directions to fix this issue now.

There's been some talk of routes that would go up through Iraq into Turkey, right? And that's obviously an option where Turkey could feed into the Mediterranean, feed into the Black Sea. These are very, very early discussions, however, and they are not, even if they were to get a green light tomorrow, it just wouldn't really be possible to do it in any relevant timeline to this.

So at least for me, well-intentioned, I doubt that it's going to be relevant in the near future. Yeah, I basically echo that. It's a similar case to the move away from exclusively relying on U.S. interceptors, but even more long-term, just given the geographic constraints on this.

So I do think, like, Iran is fully maximalizing Hormuz as much as it can now. I think that the whole region has basically quietly agreed, we have to make sure we're never this vulnerable to that again. But in terms of actually being able to move away from that, it's going to take a lot of time and a lot of work.

And a lot of the options are not necessarily as great as they may seem or as feasible as they may seem. So pipelines being the easiest one, but these are enormous sitting ducks for any strikes. And Iran very well may target them because they are ultimately a way of reducing Iran's leverage.

Now, we have not seen any actual pipeline be fully destroyed or anything the way that Nord Stream 2 was. But ultimately, I think that could become a thing if Iran feels as though these workarounds are sufficiently threatening their leverage over the international energy market. But I think a few months ago, I even put in a script.

I think a few months ago, I even put in a script. to mind that so donald tusk the legendary polish prime minister once said after nordstrom 2 was destroyed that the issue with nordstrom 2 was not that it was blown up but it but that it was built and i have to say i can see a world in which the islamic republic adopts a very polish stance on any work around pipelines and let's stick to the oil markets a little bit because some numbers just came out for the last quarter that showed the u.s and the global oil industry doing very well in this conflict like i believe it was chevron who like tripled their their profits for the quarter exxon did very well a few other companies in there clearly there is a profit incentive here in some degree with this war jacking up oil prices companies being able to benefit from that there is of course the other side to it which is these companies expect to extract a certain amount of oil in a given time if they can't do that right if refineries are backed up if oil fields are running over capacity to try and strain and make up or they have infrastructure destroyed and that's a whole other issue you obviously don't want oil sitting in containers that are overfilling because ships can't move so on so forth right so there's a downside to all this but even with that said the industry is posting record profits so how do you see that financial return playing into this war and the negotiations that we're seeing happen yeah i do see i mean high oil prices always benefit oil companies after the invasion of ukraine conoco phillips stock was up i think like better than 60 percent and it's not just conoco phillips there were it was a huge moment for all of the energy companies that benefit from just high oil prices so if we get hormuz back open that's certainly going to take them back down a bit the emirati economy was actually just came out as still growing despite all of this which is a bit of a surprise but the fact that they're able to even grow any amount given the current shortage or blockade blockades going on the it is a testament to resilience in the middle east but more broadly i mean i don't see that being any form of like incentive to keep this going because trump is certainly under a lot of pressure to get this open again and he has been a big champion of low energy prices so the fact that gas is still north of five dollar excuse me four dollars a gallon in most of the u.s is not to his advantage in the slightest speaking of trump he said to the press chevron too much money exxon mobil too much money they're going to give some of that back to the public and they better cut the retail price the consumer price so and when the chief of b DBP's British Petroleum, when she was asked about Trump's comments, she said that the reality is we produce a global commodity and the product we sell hangs off that global commodity price. So Trump has been really, really good to the oil markets. His decision to invade Venezuela and kick Maduro out opened up a whole new set of oil fields for them, and his decision to invade Iran has made them billions and billions of dollars worth of profit.

So I don't think he has the political leverage right now to demand oil prices, you know, pump prices to go lower, but it's definitely something worth watching because high pump prices are one of the things he keeps pointing out, he kept pointing out rather, during his re-election bid against Joe Biden during the last presidential election. So the fact that oil companies are making huge, huge profits is not going to sit well with the American people, as long as these profits are not being translated to cuts at the pump. So that's going to be a big challenge for Trump.

Yeah, I think the pricing being more significant than the profits, in my perspective, I don't think too many care that much if gas is low, what they're doing. So like overall, Trump has exercised some like hardline stances on this. So like he was actually blocking American companies initially from drilling in Venezuela.

So PDVSA was trying to get American companies to move in and start drilling with them, PDVSA being the Venezuelan one. But ultimately, so Biden greenlit American companies drilling in Venezuela. Trump revoked that, but then re-greenlit it before the capture of Maduro.

So he kind of all over the place, but ultimately, certainly very pro-drilling. But I have to imagine the focus here definitely being on just getting the cost of any oil-related products as low as possible. And Kyle, you mentioned the Emirates in there as well.

I wanted to pull the conversation to them because as of now, the Emirates have gone quite a while without experiencing a direct attack. I believe they, in two days back to back during July, they did come under a limited assault from Iran. Other than that, they've been left pretty much unscathed by this renewed entry into greater hostilities.

A lot of talk about how the Emirates seem to have worked out some backdoor arrangement with the Iranians that keeps them safe. That obviously is very helpful to the Emirates, given that they've really tried to present themselves as this kind of safe, stable crown jewel of the Middle East for foreigners, for international residents. So, looking at the Emirates and their situation.

Now, do you see anything that they've done differently than other countries? And what do you believe that will either do for them? Or how do you believe that may come back to bite them in the long run with Iran in this seemingly gaining position in the Middle East?

Well, one of the most fascinating dynamics with the Iranian relationship with the Emirates has been both the deep animosity from the Islamic Republic to the Emirates, which was why for most of the first part of Operation Epic Fury, the Emirates were on the receiving end of north of 50% of Iranian strikes on the Gulf, at least, which is such a disproportionate share. Especially given the Emirates is where the Islamic Republic parked their money, including in January, they were moving over a billion dollars of money related to senior regime officials, not national wealth, like personal wealth of the upper echelon, the creme de la creme of the Islamic Republic was moved to Dubai and Abu Dhabi, despite the fact that they were very well aware that if a war broke out, that they would be that they would be attacking the Emirates, so this set up such an unusual relationship that both, even though they were able to attack the Emirates, there was, the Emirates still had this like ace up their sleeve where it's like, we can just freeze and take all of your money that you've given us. And so I think this, like more recently, we've seen where the Iran has just stopped firing on the Emirates, they must have worked something out behind the scenes involving the money, because fundamentally, it just doesn't make sense to be firing so heavily on your own bank account.

So I have to imagine that being one of the reasons. We'll have to see that's not confirmed at all. But we'll, we'll see where that goes.

And as long as we're bringing in other countries, why don't we talk about Lebanon as well? So Kyle, could you give us kind of some background into what's happening there? And where the situation stands today?

Yeah, so Lebanon, I mean, the progress here has been what I'm, I'm coining, it's glacially slow. I mean, this is literally glaciers move faster than what's been going on there. So we've seen the world's slowest withdrawal, since the agreement was reached a month ago at this point, between Israel and Lebanon.

So the deal would be that these pilot zones would begin to roll out in which the LAF would displace the IDF in the south of the country, and begin the process of disarming Hezbollah. Hezbollah has repeatedly stated and made good on the promise that they would not fire on LAF officials, disarming Hezbollah south of the Latani River. The focus has been south of the Latani River. because that is the area that borders Israel.

It's where Hezbollah has launched its attacks into northern Israel consistently. It's where Israel has the most valid security concerns, because right on their border, I think somewhere around 60,000 northern Israeli residents have variously been displaced and come back and displaced again, given the constant fighting there. So genuine security concerns for sure.

But more recently, after the first phase rolled out, where the IDF did withdraw from the town of Zartar al-Gabia, and Prime Minister Nawaz Salam had a bit of an Iwo Jima moment where he was planting the Lebanese flag in a bit of a mountain, this time a mountain of rubble instead of an actual mountain. But nevertheless, it was quite a photogenic moment there for him. After that, the only progress that's been made so far has been the IDF apparently requesting that Lebanon move in to Ali al-Tahir, which is a hill north of the Latani River, near the city of Nabatea.

So this is a different level, because it's an area that Israel has claimed within its so-called yellow line, but it's also outside of the areas that the IDF actually controls. So this is a double whammy, because it's asking the LAF to go into areas that the IDF does not control, so there is no withdrawal from there. And it's in an area that was not originally going to be the initial focus here, which is areas south of the Latani River.

So this is why their initial move, like a month or two ago, where the IDF moved from its original stance south of the Latani to the north, was such an important milestone, because it would at least be able to be doing work that would have been much harder for the LAF to be doing. That's sort of out of the window now. It wants the LAF to be doing this.

That's going to cause big issues. I don't see Lebanon going for that until the job south of the Latani is fully finished. And we should also note that Lebanon is not the only country where an Iranian proxy is now coming under a great deal of pressure.

So in Israel, Hamas just recently agreed to a disarmament deal. This is according to the United States, according to Donald Trump, who has essentially said that Hamas has agreed to surrender all of its weapons, which will be stored. It's going to then be essentially sublimated to a Gaza authority that is under the Board of Peace, which is, of course, Trump's geopolitical invention to manage the Israel conflict.

Israel has made very, very clear that they are not interested in accepting this deal as written. Of course, you have to take what Itamar Ben-Gavir, one of the really, really far right. It's great. in Israel says with a grain of salt, but essentially his argument was that this deal would give Hamas free reign to prepare and prep for another October 7th style attack, which is a sentiment that has now been echoed in a fair share of Israeli leadership.

According to some Israeli sources, the country has already informed the U.S. behind the scenes that it will not be accepting this deal, but that was purportedly told to Washington before the deal was formally announced publicly. So that kind of speaks to the continuing divergence between Israel and the U.S. on this issue. So with now Hezbollah counterinsurgent operations seeming to get just more and more complex and bogged down, and with this deal in Gaza seeming to draw pretty substantial Israeli opposition, we of course have to talk about elections.

Netanyahu is up for re-election in October. The conventional political wisdom is that he is going to have a very hard time unless he can manage to credibly reframe this as a security election in which he would be entrusted with continuing wars against Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, so on and so forth, the Houthi rebels, the proxies in Iraq, what have you. So looking at these two Iranian proxy forces together, how much do you believe that Israeli electoral politics are complicating the situation and leading to some of the continuation of this violence?

Well, so the biggest obstacle when it comes to this deal to begin with is that, at least according to Hamas, their understanding, and by the way, we've seen so many deals so far fall apart because both sides aren't on the same page as to what actually is in the thing. So per Hamas, Israel has to fully withdraw before it will agree to lay down its weapons. I don't see Israel doing that before Hamas lays down its weapons.

I think this thing's just going to fall apart. As we saw with the original one, we've done, in many instances, these deals that get a very short-term fix that kick all of the bigger questions down the road, back to what we were talking about with the 60-day thing with Hormuz, visited another case. The original board of peace plan, it had phase one being like the lowest barrier to entry, where it was basically the U.S. saying like, okay, Israel has to permit a certain amount of aid into the strip, and there'd be a ceasefire, and then Hamas has to release all of the hostages, both alive and dead.

Okay, that's done. But phase two came around, who actually came to withdrawing for Israel and laying down weapons for Hamas, completely fell apart because the sides were never on the same page on this stuff, and it was transparently obvious as to why the whole thing collapsed in the first place. I don't think anything has really been fixed on that.

Israel is a has expanded its position in Gaza from 50 to 70 percent over the last month, month and a half. So the insistence with which Hamas and other Palestinian groups in Gaza will insist on an Israeli withdrawal is only heightened from this. So ultimately, I don't see this really being too sustainable.

I'm not sure that entirely addressed your question, but I think needed clarity there. I think a lot of this just boils down to the struggles with which international peacemaking efforts are facing, because this isn't just something we're seeing in the Middle East. We've seen it in Congo when the Congo government and the Rwandan government signed a peace deal and fighting still continued.

There's so many issues when it comes to international peacemaking and just the idea that we can kick the can down the road indefinitely. And it's going to come back to bite us all at one point or another. And in Gaza, it's already happening.

There were, I believe the Israeli army killed about 100 people recently. I'd need to check my numbers, but it was a large, large scale offensive. And even with Iran and the U.S., just the idea that they can kick the can down the road 60 days, 60 days, it's not how you make lasting peace.

It's not how you negotiate, basically. Yeah, this is something that I've been thinking a lot about recently as well. Like you said, for a lot of wars across the globe, where, you know, we can all bag on the post-Cold War order all we want.

And we do regularly, obviously, the entire community of experts that we're all dialed into does that very, very often, and rightly so. That being said, one of the things that you can say about that is that there were at least an idea of strong incentives to pursue peace, right? Where the convenient thing about doing kind of this, like, peace absolutism, right?

Where even like minor incursions, minor attacks, whatever, are supposedly so intolerable is that it creates a real incentive to, you know, actually take your hands off weapons, step back from the brink, really go above and beyond to demonstrate that there's no risk of escalation before being able to re-engage internationally. And that's just not what we're seeing right now. You brought up Congo, we're watching the U.S. kind of deal with both the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda to do all these resource extraction projects while Rwandan-backed rebels aided by Rwandan uniformed troops are fighting common elites troops in, like, ongoing across the eastern part of the country.

And we could look at similar situations in Pakistan. We could look at similar situations in Libya. We could look at similar things. even now in Sudan starting up, Somalia, so on and so forth, where the incentive for a real, genuine, enforced peace to do business with the U.S. and thus, because the U.S. is such a conduit to it, to do business with the Western world, where so much of this money is concentrated, the idea of peace as a long-term barrier or as a long-term prerequisite to engagement seems to have broken apart completely, and that has effects that go way, way beyond the Middle East.

It's something I spoke about with Professor Alex de Waal on my Due South podcast a little while ago, just the struggles with making peace, and I want to paraphrase something he said during that podcast. Professor Alex de Waal is obviously the executive director of the World Peace Foundation at the Taft School at Fletcher. He said that, and I'm paraphrasing here, basically our inability to make peace will leave a much worse world for our future, for our children and future generations moving forward.

Yeah, hard to argue with that. Very hard to argue with that. I do want to bring up one final point, which I suppose isn't really peace exactly, but is at least a vector of conflict in the Middle East that we're not seeing right now.

That is the connection directly between Iran and Israel. This obviously was a very important part of the early war where we had Iran launching at long range into Israel, Israeli aircraft assisting U.S. forces over Iran. Israel has mostly sat out the resumption of this conflict even as it continues to drill down on Hezbollah, on Hamas, to a limited degree on the Houthi rebels, and even as Israel's leadership makes clear that they do see this as an existential final showdown with Iran where they have the opportunity to reset the Middle Eastern status quo in a way that favors them for the long term.

So with all of that in mind and with Israel's general hawkishness in this period, also in mind, what do you make of the decision not to engage Iran directly during this phase? I think that they're sort of holding their fire in case it does come back, like a full war comes back on, because overall we have seen at each stage where Donald Trump is threatening to return to all-out war with Iran, we have seen that Israel is fully willing to get back in the fight. So I don't think that they're just opting out of this.

It is interesting to me that throughout the rest of the Gulf, which did not support this war in the first place, they're coming under fire from Iran while Israel is just sort of able to sit there and kick back with their feet up. So I do think that is an interesting name. I think the overwhelming, like the biggest reason for that is just Iran doesn't want to drag them back into the conflict.

But I also think that Iran really blew a very important and incredible... unique opportunity to drive a wedge between Washington and Jerusalem. There was a span of three weeks where there was multiple phone calls each week of Donald Trump just absolutely lambasting Netanyahu, saying all types of things, saying you're effing crazy, everybody hates you, everybody hates Israel, all these different things. That was because if they had played their cards in a less Hormuz-maxing way, if you will, it would have basically allowed Iran to say, oh, you want free shipping?

You want Hormuz open? Okay, you have to get Israel to stop doing X. They could have done this for years to come, okay?

They could have done this for any issue that they wanted, but because that they took a much more maximalist approach where it's like, no, you know what, we're going to be doing full tolls no matter what. We're still firing on civilian ships, blah, blah, blah, in Hormuz, regardless of what Israel does. It actually put Israel back in the side of the U.S. So Netanyahu visited the White House early last week, and it was basically a full getting back together event between Trump and Netanyahu, which again, that did not need to have happened if you were the Iranians, had they played their cards differently.

Kyle, you and I spoke about this on the podcast last week while Evan was at the Babel Mandem Strait, but it's Iran basically snatched a very major geopolitical victory. They snatched that away from themselves. They took it away from themselves.

And again, I talk about strategic failures a lot because from the outside looking in, we have the advantage of being able to point stuff like this out. But maybe in the heat of the moment, with the fog of war, they can't really feel like that. But Iran's failure to take full advantage of the gulf, the growing opinion gulf between America and Israel was a very big strategic mistake.

And with that said, I think we're going to start closing down for today because we are, unfortunately, at our time. But as we look to the week ahead, I would love to hear what each of you are watching, what you think we should be paying attention to. And yeah, anything else that you think is worthy of our attention in the coming week?

Sure. So I'm keeping a close eye on the talks that may or may not be going on between the United States and Iran. Basically, Trump has been variously floating that a deal is right around the corner.

Iran has variously been saying that they're not even in discussions. But there are indications that I've been seeing that there could be a breakthrough in the next few days. So we'll have to keep an eye on that.

Again, taking this with massive grains of salt here. But there is one of the newspaper cartoons that I saw the other day. It's Donald Trump in a therapist office.

And he's saying, I've been talking to the Iranians for two days. And the therapist is going, are these Iranians in the room with us right now? And I feel like that may be touching on something that's sort of indicative of where these talks actually stand.

For me, I'm watching internal Iranian politics just to see whether the fracture, the fractures that had emerged between the various factions will continue to be present and to what kind of degree they will influence any possible discussion with Oman and how far those fractures will affect Iran's ability to conduct itself in this war. That's what I'm watching. And for me, my attention will continue to be on the Houthi rebels in Yemen.

That seems like a really, really important vector right now, especially if they do start blockading other countries' transit through the Red Sea. And even if they don't, really, really, really important to see how Saudi pressure starts to change the course of this conflict. Saudi Arabia has a lot of money to throw around, has a lot of influence.

Some reporting this past week that the U.S. had planned a much larger round of strikes. It was only called off because of pressure from the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. So really interested to see how Saudi Arabia reacts to this changing circumstance and what comes out of that.

So with all of that, with this tumultuous and confusing week now in the rear view mirror, we want to just thank everybody who has tuned in and who has stuck around thus far for tuning into the Middle East Roundtable here at Front's. If you've gotten this far, you are almost certainly a premium subscriber, for which we thank you very, very much. We could not do any of this work without you.

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This has been Evan Maloney with Wilford Mina and Kyle Moran over here at the Middle East Roundtable for Front's.co. Thank you very much, and we'll see you next week. Thank you.
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