Okay, hello and welcome to or welcome back to Colonial Outcast. My name is Greg Stoker.

I'm joined by what we can now probably call a returning political analyst Alina Xenophantos.

She's based out of London. And today we are going to be talking about bricks, Belt and Road, the continuing drama and escalation between Israel, Iran, and the

West, and a couple of spending packages that are in the works, because, you know, the U.S.,

their main modus operandi of solving problems is just throwing money at it and hoping, you know, for the best.

So to that end, we've all been tracking the drama unfolding between Israel and Iran.

It began on April 1st with Israel bombing a Iranian consulate in Damascus, which was a direct

attack on Iranian sovereignty.

They had to respond. They took two weeks to do it. A lot of back-channeling coordination happened, and they finally did it this past Saturday.

This episode is being recorded on April 18th, by the way.

And Iran shot over 300 munitions, a mixture of drones and medium range ballistic missiles.

Some got through, hit Nevitim Air Force Base and occupied Nekob.

And it was a kind of a chess move.

It gave Israel the opportunity to say that their Iron Dome system worked and the Iranian

operation was a failure and it gave Iran

the opportunity to say like, hey, we can hit their military targets with our old equipment.

We didn't even use our new fancy Cadillac stuff.

So it was basically a perfect opportunity for Iran and way for Iran to restore deterrence,

for Israel to save face and run their propaganda machines into overtime,

and give themselves an excuse not to respond to Iran, because Iran has said,

this time if Israel retaliates, we're going to respond disproportionately.

So the game has always been de-escalation. The U.S. says that they don't want

...