Rudyard Griffiths

are seeing stresses in their economy.

They are close to Iran.

They, in fact, played a pretty big role in rearming Iran over the last year.

Should we put some hope that there might be a role that China could play here vis-a-vis this US administration, a president looking for a way out and a premier in China

with lots of cards to play with Iran, which is a country that will need to rebuild once this conflict does end at some time.

Yeah, I noticed today that Trump is now encouraging South Korea on the basis of a shipping attack to send its Navy.

Yeah, I think he's true socialing himself and all of us into some kind of state of condition.

Just as we wrap up this section of the show, Andrew, if we step back from this and we think that this war, like unfortunately so many wars, easy to start, hard to finish, there are so many parallels in my mind between –

what's happened over the last 60 days and Vladimir Putin's failed invasion of Ukraine.

Similarly, Putin thought that the war would be over fast, that he would, in fact, decapitate the regime in Kiev, seize control of the country and turn it into a satrap of Russia.

That war now, Andrew, we know is dragged on three plus years, potentially a million casualties on both sides, hundreds of thousands dead and really no end in sight.

How do you gauge the risk here that it's not simply that the United States has stumbled into a war with Iran in the Straits of Hormuz, but that this conflict might be much more intractable

than we're even realizing now.

I do.

I'm guilty of this.

We seem to talk about the next two weeks or the next four weeks.

Today, though, was concerning.

The low-level, low-intensity asymmetrical warfare by Iran, as you said, doing exactly what it needed to do, creating enough uncertainty that shippers, insurers would not put their boats through harm's way.

But it's not attacking U.S.

destroyers.