572. Trump’s Next Middle East Crisis and Reform’s £72m Megadonation

Completely staggering story.

So very quick reminder of what happened.

So the Houthi started really in the nineteen nineties as an obscure cult in the mountains of Yemen.

And if you'd been covering the story back in the nineties, you would have thought these are people in sandals with Kalashnikovs who don't really matter in world events.

Fast-forward to today, this is a group in Yemen with ballistic missiles which can strike Israel and Dubai, which have been accessing the latest AI models-

Mm.

-the US companies are reporting on this, and which now have expanded forward and seized the key gap to the entrance to the Red Sea, and this really matters.

It is-

And, and the coastline down towards it.

The whole coastline down, and, and this is a very narrow gap.

If you were going at twenty knots, you could get across it in about half an hour.

Mm.

And what does that mean? Well, it suddenly means that Saudi Arabia and others who thought, well, we don't need to worry too much about the Strait of Hormuz 'cause we can still get four million barrels out through Yenbu and out through the Red Sea, are now blocked at both ends.

This is critical, existential for the Gulf States and really dangerous for the global economy.

And all this has been pulled off not by the US or China or even a big, relatively wealthy state like Iran, but by a group of people who back even two months ago, many people in the officially recognized Yemeni government said the Houthi were a, a, an empty shell that were about to collapse, and they were gonna be marching on Sanaa.

If you look at the map, so you've got the Strait of Hormuz, which we took for granted as a place that was always going to have oil flowing through and world trade going through it, and the Americans, every American president saying, "Let's not do this because they'll shut down the Strait of Hormuz." And of course, Trump says, "No, they won't." Well, they do.

So the Saudis have this twelve-hundred-kilometer pipeline that goes right across the country, and so they, they think, "Well, we can get round through that.

We'll just put more through the pipeline, and then we'll get it out through the Red Sea." Another Iranian proxy inside Iraq is then starting to send drones in and to damage this pipeline.

So the pipeline shuts down.

And meanwhile, the oil that they wanted to compensate for the Strait of Hormuz by bringing out through the Red Sea into the Gulf of Aden, they're now having to go north, right round Africa.

So right up through, across, past Spain, round the corner, and right down, adding about two to four weeks to an average tanker's journey.

And what does that do? It puts up the price.

So, uh, and do you know what I find the most of the many revolting things that Trump said and did in, in Ireland? He blamed Zelenskyy for the rising fuel prices.

He said, if, if Zelenskyy's-- One thing Zelenskyy's gotta do is stop hitting these diesel plants in, in, uh-

Russia