Welcome everybody to the Untold Story podcast.

It's great to have you with us.

I'm Martha McCallum, and we are digging deep into what's going on in the Persian Gulf right now and the

Strait of Hormuz as we move into the second week of the ceasefire that is now in place

in this huge and, you know, impactful situation that's happening in the Middle East.

So I'm very glad today to be joined by a research fellow at the Hudson Institute Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East. So I'm very glad today to be joined by a research fellow at the Hudson Institute,

Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East, Zeneb Rabua, and her work focuses on great

power competition, the role of China and Russia in the Middle East, as well as Arab-Israeli relations.

And she's written many very insightful pieces on this that have been,

you know, sort of crossing our desk lately in particular. And we're very delighted to have

her Zeneb. Thank you for joining me today. Thank you very much for having me. So Zeneb, I would

like to start, you know, as our listeners are tuning into the podcast, give us a sense of

who you are and where you came from originally and sort of your frame of reference and how

you approach your work in research and writing about this region.

Yeah, so I'm a research fellow at Hudson.

I have been focusing for a very long time on basically U.S. foreign policy in the Middle

East, but seeing it from just a very different angle, from the great power competition angle,

from what does that look for China?

What are the implications for Russia and so on? And therefore, I've been trying to

really carve out just a new way to look at the region, not just as a region where you can find

conflicts and wars, but also opportunities that can benefit Americans. I'm originally from

Morocco, so the United States is very dear to my heart,

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