Oz Veloshian

So I've known Ian for a long time, and we have had an ongoing discussion about...

focusing too much on the risks and not enough on the possibilities.

And he's one of the foremost foreign policy thinkers, prognosticators.

Right, but he's also built a business focusing on risks to help companies understand the risk matrix that they are entering into and help governments and help individuals, all which is vital and important, and he's brilliant at it.

But my challenge to him is often...

If we're focusing so much on the risks, what are we potentially missing?

And the conversation I have with him may not do that as much, but that's the spirit in which I enter into it.

Zachary Karabell, thank you.

Thank you.

Ian, it's a pleasure to have you back.

So we had this conversation more than two years ago, right after October 7th, 2023.

If you're going to look at the past two and a half years in the Middle East from a risk perspective, I imagine things have probably gone worse than one would have expected.

But how much of this would you have anticipated, not obviously in its specificity, but in its general chaos?

So the big picture thing that was not surprising is that Israel, given its military escalation dominance in the region, was gonna continue to be able to call the shots.

Some of the abilities that they displayed in terms of targeting and assassinating all of the leaders of Hezbollah, for example, I mean, the trade craft is quite something.

But that's not surprising.

I think the surprising thing is that Trump decided to go much bigger on Iran as opposed to a repetition of the 12-day war.

And he's now gotten himself in the thick of it.

And the result of that has been that the one thing that has been the most extraordinary development coming out of the Middle East in the last 20 years

which has been the globalization and these world-class economic models that are being developed out of the Gulf are now being proven to be geopolitically extremely vulnerable.