Josh Chin

anytime soon, they just don't worry about it as much.

Yeah, you know, I think the big general concern for the U.S.

right now is that warfare is kind of moving to these sorts of cheap, disposable weapon systems like the Shahed drone.

And that the parts used in those weapon systems are very common.

I mean, the engine we're talking about is kind of like a motorcycle engine or a scooter engine.

And so these things are really easy to hide in the flow of global trade, unlike, say, a nuclear weapon or a ballistic missile, which use these very unique parts that are easy for nonproliferation officials to sort of spot and stop the trade of.

So we're sort of going into this new era where the U.S.

is just not going to be able to control the spread of weapons the way it used to.

Yeah, so we talked to the Treasury Department and what they told us is that they are, you know, they recognize that they can't really stop this.

And so their ultimate aim is to just disrupt it as much as possible.

And the way they're trying to do that is by cutting off funding sources.

So Iran funds a lot of its weapon purchases through the sale of oil to China.

The U.S.

is basically trying to disrupt the ability of those oil revenues to be used

by Iran.

You know, they have succeeded in some ways in sort of forcing the, you know, Iranian and Russian drone programs to rely more on Chinese parts rather than other sort of more sophisticated Western parts that they were buying earlier.

And the Chinese parts are not, you know, they're not as good.

And so the drones don't perform as well.

So there is some benefit to that.

My pleasure.