Your thoughts on where America's at with this sort of security guarantor role in the region and where Pakistan, India fits in? I know that's a region you've covered a long time.

Yeah, I think they are trying to limit expectations quite dramatically at this point.

You know, I think right now the thinking is, get through the midterm elections.

They've pretty much resigned themselves to the existing situation, probably getting worse, prices probably going even higher.

But they'd breathe a sigh of relief if they could get through without, say, a U.S. military ship being hit by a missile or a drone before the election.

So I think after that, there's going to be – you know, a long-term struggle that's going to continue to escalate.

And they're putting limits on sort of how far the U.S. is going to be willing to go and how much they're expecting the region to have to do for itself because they simply do have limits at this point that they're realizing.

What's your sense of where this relationship goes and where Trump's managing? How important is it, again, with the backdrop of the midterm elections?

Where were you born? What did you study? How did you become a journalist? And how did you specifically then started working on energy climate issues? So let's go down that rabbit hole of decades of your work.

You are.

It's a long tale at this point.

So I grew up in Michigan in a town called Grand Rapids.

And I basically started working at the college newspaper, which got me into journalism, which then sort of got me working in local journalism, mostly in Michigan at first.

I just covered the police beat and local government and that sort of thing but i always wanted to go abroad and i sort of got my chance a couple years later when my wife needed to go to japan for her phd research she's a japanese art historian so i went to japan without a job found a job there and started you know kind of working as a journalist and the story in japan in the 1990s was was really a business story But I covered the auto industry for a while for Businessweek magazine.

And then the financial story in Japan really became the big story.

So are we going to see some big shifts as a result of this conflict and realignment? And what are your thoughts on that?

... it's one pa- piece of paper, MOU, 10 or 14 points.

I think that, that is likely at some point, but even that takes a certain amount of, of, uh, of dealing.

Uh, and I do think Iran's not gonna do it without some form of income coming their way.

Um, you know, sanctions relief, uh, money that's been, uh, been held of their own.

Some, some sort of, uh, money that they can start to use to, you know, expand their, their control over the country again.

Um, and you know, that, that's...

They're not likely to agree to that sort of a deal.

Where do you see the impact there and the legacy of that?