All right, Alexander, let's talk about what is going on in the Middle East.

Axios is reporting that there is a lot of effort now being placed on convincing Trump to go hard against Iran.

Military strikes against Iran, a lot of lot being taking place to get Trump to green light attacks against Iran. A lot of lobbying taking place to get Trump to green light attacks

against Iran. We have a split between Israel and Turkey, which is very interesting, given their

cooperation, their apparent cooperation in the regime change in Syria and the carving up of

Syria. Now it looks like Erdogan wants to assert his dominance in the region, and Israel wants

to assert their dominance in the region, and they're heading towards a clash. So what are you making of everything going on in the Middle East Iran, Israel,

Turkey? What's happening here? Well, I think the first thing to say is that this is all the

product of the collapse of the Assad government. Now, we said when it happened that those people who thought that this would

be the dawn of the new age of freedom, democracy and peace in the Middle East, we're going to

be disappointed. What we're starting to see already, and we're at the early stages yet, and we don't

know how it's all going to play out. What we're starting to see is that with the Assad government

removed from the picture, with Syria essentially removed from the picture, instability in the

Middle East is actually growing and it's growing in terms of interstate competition,

because Turkey and Israel are now quarreling over the division of spoils in Syria.

And there's growing signs of, you know, Israel becoming worried about Turkey and Turkey becoming increasingly

threatening towards Israel. We'll come to that in a moment. And we also see that the Israelis

having destroyed Syria's air defense system and having seen Assad's government fall and having

seen the Russians remove all their big radar systems in Syria, they are now increasingly

keen to push for this missile strike against Iran. We discussed in the earlier program how Jake Sullivan and all of his people had tried to win over Joe Biden to that idea a few weeks ago.

And how it didn't happen.

We thought that it might do whilst Biden was still in office.

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