Richard Miniter

Why certain bases being reestablished, why there's so much diplomacy going on in the Western Pacific.

I mean, connect all the dots.

because I guarantee you China has and Putin has.

My goodness.

I thought it was your love of Gandalf.

I mean, the Gulf people are deeply unhappy for lots of objectively observable reasons.

First of all, they have to make a lot of their water through desalinization, which is a very energy intensive process.

Desalination plants not only cost billions of dollars, but they're gigantic, very easy for Shahid drones to hit.

And it doesn't take much to put a relatively small damage to send a shutter through the UAE or Bahrain that they will be out of water.

There's no readily nearby place where they can import water and there are no existing pipelines to move it.

So we tend to focus on the other fluid, which is oil, which is how they make their money.

But without water, they die.

And

their desalinization plants are on the coast, right?

As you'd expect them to be.

So they're very easy to hit.

And even small strikes are red alert news across the Gulf.

So they feel very vulnerable.

However, we see that they're starting to realize that they're going to have to get into this fight.

UAE has decided in the last few weeks not just to leave OPEC, which at another point in time would be a giant headlock.