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Was the editor of The Atlantic actually accidentally included in some rangy group chat among bros that included a denunciation of European defense policy? Are you stupid? Have you recently had a brain aneurysm? Leaving aside this obvious straw dog, what is Washington actually signaling here?

Meanwhile, the Chinese, Japanese and South Koreans are getting together to sign declarations of mutual support, pledging increased economic cooperation, and gently letting the whole Taiwan thing slide. When nations with rape slaves levels of historical beef are making nice, you know something is shifting.

Finally, is Martin Bormann alive and well and living in Argentina? No. But as Malay's government releases the papers on the Third Reich, the historical mythology of World War II is under attack as never before. What happens when the post-1945 world order has to deal with the messy reality of the pre-1945 world?

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But first, Jeffrey has entered the chat. The Trump administration have decided to relaunch the war on Yemen or on the Houthis in Yemen, obviously, because they're not actually the official government, even though they sort of are.

And I guess we're being assured that this time is different and they finally figured out a way to crack the Houthi knot. I think the kind of vague talking point that's going around was that Biden wasn't tough enough or something. This is Biden who's been, you know, launching a proxy war on Russia for a couple of years. I don't think the guy had a lot in the way of self-restraint. So that hypothesis might not have as much to it as some people understand.

on Twitter who are saying that we're going to find out why the Americans don't have healthcare. I think it does. So America's engaged in a bombing campaign against the Houthis. Why the Houthis are kicking off again, obviously, because the ceasefire in Gaza is no longer a ceasefire. There is currently military action in Gaza. Bombings, I believe.

So the Houthis have started firing missiles again. I think I saw reports that they'd fired one of their new, they call it hypersonic missiles, I think they just mean moderately advanced hypersonic missiles. It was targeted at an airport in Israel.

but Israel managed to shoot it down. These missiles from the Houthis have got through before, so Israel is not completely invulnerable to them. The Trump administration has decided that they need to go in hard on the Houthis, and they've done some missile strikes on the Houthis. These look very similar to the Biden ones, as in the carrier sits fairly far offshore because they don't want to get hit.

hit by any big missiles and they kind of fire into Yemen and you know there's a big explosion when it hits a petrol dump or something like that and then I don't know what's supposed to happen next we've been doing this for over a year now we had a year of Houthis last year at the very beginning we expressed skepticism about whether it would work in any way it didn't work

There's no reason to think it will work this time. So I mean that's pretty much the assessment of that. There was this leak, supposed leak anyway, it might be a real leak I don't know, of the internal group chat which showed kind of a back and forth. I don't think it really said anything that interesting. JD Vance made a comment about the Europeans. I think that's what got the headlines but it's not actually that relevant to what's going on in the Middle East.

The real issue with the action in the Middle East right now is whether they're just getting sucked back into the conflicts that Biden was in. So in the first few weeks of the Trump administration, I think we were both in agreement that the Trump administration was doing some revolutionary things.

And they were genuinely shaking up the system. This did not look like the first Trump administration. It looked very organized. It looked like they knew which targets they wanted to hit. They picked the targets previous. They had sufficient ammunition. They had sufficient troops.

And they went after certain things in American foreign policy and the deep state and the blob, whatever you want to call it. They cut out USAID, a huge deal. We did an episode on that. It was a massive deal. Should never be underestimated, underplayed. And then they made this big pivot to Russia that was kind of, in a way,

It surprised even people who suspected that Trump would try and wind down the war, because it also included kind of a geostrategic outreach to Russia to try and kind of pull them back a little bit away from China, maybe to work with them on certain things like Arctic minerals and so on.

Well, what we're seeing this week with the Houthis is that at a certain point, momentum can run out for these things. Sorry, I should have also mentioned that there was an imposed ceasefire in Gaza, which stopped all the action in the Middle East. So what seems to be happening now is that the momentum has run out for the early phase of the Trump administration, for those first couple of weeks, when they could go in and they could just smash, smash, smash, change, change, change.

And now what's happening is both the conflicts themselves are kind of clawing at the feet of the Trump administration and slowing it down. And at the same time, all of the kind of lobbying and interest groups around certain conflicts are starting to reassert themselves. By the way, this isn't just in the Middle East, although the situation is much more dramatic in the Middle East. The ceasefire talks in Ukraine...

are not going very well. And the chatter is that they're probably not going to go anywhere and they're just going to go back and forth like a ping pong game until this summer when the weapons start running out for Ukraine and the Trump administration is given an ultimate choice of whether to send even more. And at that point there's a decision tree opens up and I'm pretty sure we know what the Trump administration is going to do. They're not going to send any more and then there'll be an enforcement of it. But the point is

Those initial weeks when it looked like they might get this grand big resolution and the Americans and the Russians might give each other a hug and work together on Arctic mineral deals, it's not going to work like that. I think ultimately they will get to an arrangement, peace will be established, etc., etc. But I'm just pointing out that in both instances what's happening is that the weeds are starting to tangle around the feet of the runner, as it were, and they're kind of getting slowed down in the weedy part of the field.

For Russia, I don't think this will prevent a pivot on the strategy with Russia, and I don't think it'll prevent a pivot on the war. But there is a chance now that it will prevent a pivot on the Middle East.

I think that'll probably stop short of a war with Iran, because I think the Trump administration is so opposed to having a large war. Every indication seems to me that they're going to get pulled back into the Middle East, and the conflict there is going to look pretty much like it did for Biden in 2024. Yeah, of course it will. There is no difference now to then. When...

This happened the first time and the Americans said that they were going to put a stop to this. You know, Biden rolled out Operation Prosperity Guardian, right, was the name of the operation. You and I had a podcast and we both said, no, that's wrong. That's not going to work out. That's not going to achieve any of its goals. And it'll probably end in some kind of humiliating retreat for the US. And that's exactly what happened.

The U.S. Navy was driven out of the Red Sea. They had failed. I mean, they dropped a whole load of ordnance on Yemen, but they had failed in any of their targets. The Red Sea remained closed or partially closed, and the U.S. Navy hadn't been able to reassert control. Now, none of that changes just because Donald Trump is in the White House. The problem is still the same. I mean, I say it's a problem. It's not. It's a predicament.

There's a difference between a problem and a predicament. Problems are there to be solved. A predicament is there to be coped with. And that's what this is. The US in the Bundestag. Hello there, this is Andy Collingwood. I'm here to tell you that the rest of this discussion is for our Patreons only.

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