Ben Rhodes

That's what you keep hearing.

The fear factor is, other than Keir Starmer, who's always kind of hiding in the corner, world leaders are not afraid of this man anymore.

They think he's incompetent.

Fine.

But that's the point.

They don't care.

NATO doesn't want to be at the Strait of Hormuz.

The other thing people in Europe know is that Putin benefited from high energy prices.

Putin got sanctions relief.

We were literally waiving sanctions on Russian oil sales because we were so afraid of the price of gas, right?

Putin is much stronger than before this war, and the Europeans know that too.

So they...

Spare them the lectures about the talking points from 2015.

Tim, I just think that this shtick is old.

It's 10 years old.

Donald Trump is a lame duck.

He's pulling the 30s.

These leaders are starting to look past him and realizing, yeah, the madman thing, maybe we had to give him some tariff deals in the first six months of his presidency, but no more.

I think that this might be the largest geopolitical shift of the whole war because the whole premise of this decade of the Gulf being at the center of this kind of megaverse, right, and all their investments in Jared Kushner, the whole premise of the Abraham Accords, right, is that we're going to stand up to Iran together and we're going to give you all these defense capabilities.

Look, what did they get for all this?