I'm here for a very special edition of the War on the Rocks podcast series. I'm in London on the roof of the brand new hotel at the radio bar overlooking the Strand campus at King's College London with Professor Sir Lawrence Friedman.

Lori, thanks so much for joining us for a little conversation about state of the world.

State of the world.

Yeah.

So, you know, there's obviously a lot happening and it's sort of hard to remember in recent memory when the world was beset with so many crises.

How would you sort of describe the state of what people keep calling the international order?

Well, there isn't an international order.

Possibly never has been in the sense that everything in its place and stable and fitting together.

What I think is,

I think two things are going on.

One in the Middle East in particular,

you're having a disaggregation political movements challenging

the Western order but challenging each other, challenging a regional order, and it's very

hard, it's very fluid, it's very hard to make sense of what's going on there as a long-term

propositions for example very difficult to to describe the end game in

Syria maybe there won't be an end game in Syria,

and it's not for a long time.

A lot of countries that are trying to influence events,

interestingly now the Middle Eastern powers themselves rather than so much the external

powers are getting drawn in to these conflicts without, again, a clear sense of how they can establish control.

You can see this with the Saudi activities in Yemen

where they, one day they try to declare victory

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