Ben Rhodes

Just like you weren't there for us.

I'm going to end that very long tirade I just gave with a little clip from Pete Hegseth, the secretary of war.

He gave his first press conference in 12 days today in the middle of the war.

Yeah, where he basically just, you know, followed up on what we've been hearing from the president.

I don't know, Ben, if you were just to sit back and think like, my wildest dreams, I'm going to write this fictional story.

Would you ever have considered that it would be for us to start a war, create a global economic crisis, and then just walk away and tell everyone that it's their problem?

We literally just made everything worse.

Yeah.

And it's something we'll discuss more in terms of the ground troops, in terms of the impacts for people in the region.

There's a projection from the UN development program.

It said one month of this war could plunge 4 million more people across the Arab world into poverty and shave off up to 6% of the region's economic output during that time.

And that's just one month of the war.

We're in week five now.

of this war.

And that's, you know, that's not including all the other global economic impacts that we've talked about on the show and especially last week in our interview.

I mean, obviously something is happening, right?

Like there were 20 Pakistani oil tankers that were let through.

So somebody's talking to the Iranians, but as you mentioned, maybe it's not bilateral talks.

I can see how it's also not, you know, the Iranians would want to project an image of strength probably to their people and not say that they're negotiating with the U.S., even if they were.

But