I'm John Batchel. I welcome my good colleagues, Bill Rajo, Senior Fellow for the Foundation for the

Defense of Democracies, and Hussein Hakkane, former ambassador from Pakistan to the United States,

now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. Gentlemen, we have a quandary to sort out here.

The changing goals of the United States and his conflict with Iran, not only is that of a matter

to the people engaged in the fight and of certainly the people of Iran under the bombing of these

last weeks, but also the whole world is watching because the price of oil is now sitting at

110 after touching 111 today per barrel.

There are plenty of information that oil and its products such as diesel are now being

subsidized in Europe.

France, I'm certain of.

They've capped a liter of diesel fuel that you need for farming at this time of year. They've capped it

220 euro per liter, no higher, meaning they're subsidizing. At Costco, it's gone from 287 to

367 in a matter of weeks and headed above four. That's the cheapest gasoline you can buy in

America at the Costco lineup. So I don't need to

prove any more of the fact that the price of oil has brought everybody into this conflict. In

addition, we now have information that Iran is launching new drone attacks against its neighbors.

Kuwait was especially mentioned out of London. So, therefore, we come to ponder where we are in these serial threats that never come to the action until Iran ignores them, and then there's a new threat.

Mr. Ambassador, these threats, is there a way to present the threats as effective? The president's rhetoric

becomes more and more undiplomatic. And the most recent social media threat, it looks

pretty much like the challenge of an adolescent football game to each other, although I'm sure

that there would not be the vulgarity that at a football game to each other, although I'm sure that there would not be the

vulgarity at a football game that I see in the president's social media. But setting aside

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