I'm John Batchel with my colleagues Bill Rajo, Senior Fellow Foundation for Defense of Democracy, and Edmund Fitten

Brown, also at FD, former ambassador from UK to Yemen, former UN official. Edmund, Europe is watching,

Macron is watching, Starmers watching, Merz especially watching. What are they, what is the direction

the war is going that either

pleases or rocks Europe? Well, so here's another area in which I think the US has had some

success because of course, many other countries entered this conflict with, or rather didn't

enter it, but saw it, saw it beginning with great concern and a

reluctance to be involved. But one way or another, you know, increasingly America's allies

are on the side with it. And, you know, you have a coalition that is pledging support to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

NATO has, Mark Rutter, has just confirmed that 22 countries are involved in addressing

security. So that's an element of support. The other thing that's happened that's interesting, and this

happened before the conflict broke out, but it hasn't been affected by the conflict. And that is

that a lot of the European countries move very decisively against Iran after Iran crushed the protests

in January, because the Iranians killed tens of thousands of Iranian civilians. And the EU,

which had previously been rather cautious in the way that it addressed the Iranian issue,

it said, you know, this is no longer a legitimate regime. The Iranian regime has forfeited

its legitimacy. The EU had also, or at least the, let's say the Europeans and the British,

had also previously become much more hardline against Iran over the nuclear program, you know,

when they triggered the snapback of sanctions last autumn. So in my view, the US has received quite a lot of support in this regard. The Iranians

have alienated everybody in the way that they've responded. Now, of course, the Iranians are

still dangerous. They lash out. People would prefer that they didn't lash out at them.

We've watched our Arabian Peninsula partners struggling with how to deal with this.

...