The Houthis have rapidly expanded their control along Yemen’s western coast, seizing Mocha and strategically important Red Sea positions. That advance gives them more leverage around the Bab el-Mandeb just as a reported Iran-aligned militia attack put Saudi Arabia’s East-West oil pipeline under pressure.

Riyadh wants help. Mohammed bin Salman reportedly asked Donald Trump to intervene against the Houthis, but the White House held off. Saudi Arabia still has money, reserves, and time, but its reliable ways to move oil around the Strait of Hormuz are narrowing.

Andrew Leber joins us to explain why the Houthis are a harder problem than a conventional Iranian proxy. They receive Iranian support, but they have their own political goals, their own local base, and their own reasons to push for control of Yemen. That independence makes a broader deal with Tehran harder to translate into a durable settlement.

The episode also looks beyond the immediate crisis. The new Makkah defense agreement links Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey, but it does not guarantee that either partner would fight Iran. The United States remains powerful in the region, yet its military capacity and political appetite are both more limited than Gulf allies once assumed.

We ask what Saudi Arabia can still do, whether a renewed bombing campaign would change anything, and whether the least bad option now runs through another uneasy accommodation with Iran and the Houthis.

Further reading: Andrew Leber and Lesley Anne Warner, “The Impacts of the Houthis’ Advance Could Extend Well Beyond Saudi Arabia”, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, September 23, 2026.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit globaltantrum.substack.com

Steve and Galen look back at September 11 and the decisions that followed, from the first campaign in Afghanistan to the invasion of Iraq and the rise of the Islamic State. The conversation asks which choices were unavoidable, which were errors, and why the difference still matters.

The hosts also trace the roots of al-Qaeda, the Taliban’s sanctuary in Afghanistan, and the regional politics that shaped the wars. The result is less a simple verdict on counterterrorism than a look at how a narrow mission became a much larger project.

A recent Foreign Affairs essay by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon prompts the episode’s second question: what did the war on terror do to American politics? Steve and Galen discuss surveillance, civil liberties, fear, and the long shadow of an open-ended security state.

Twenty-five years on, the costs are easier to count than the alternatives. Brown University’s Costs of War project estimates roughly $8 trillion in broad U.S. budgetary costs for the post-9/11 wars. The harder question is what a more limited response could have achieved. Join us for that debate.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit globaltantrum.substack.com

AI is getting better at finding vulnerabilities. Whether that makes the world safer is a different question. Lennart Maschmeyer’s International Security article argues that defenders stand to gain more than attackers. Steve Palley and Galen Jackson use that argument to ask whether increasingly capable AI agents are changing the balance.

We put the article alongside Anthropic’s account of an AI-assisted espionage campaign and the independent investigation of the Hugging Face incident. A system that finds a bug is one thing. An agent that keeps working, coordinates with other agents, and finds ways around obstacles presents a different problem for the people defending a network.

There are two risks running through the discussion: governments using powerful systems against each other, and systems behaving in ways their operators did not intend. The distinction matters for deterrence. We debate whether nuclear weapons are the right comparison, or whether the difficulty of containing biological threats tells us more about what could go wrong.

The United States and China both have reasons to keep pushing. That competitive pressure could make cooperation hardest just when it becomes most useful. We close with the prospects for AI arms control, the danger of a perceived first-strike advantage, and the uncomfortable question of how much control governments and companies can actually retain.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit globaltantrum.substack.com

Would we recognize a world war before historians gave it a name? Bret Stephens’s recent essay gives us a reason to ask. Fighting in Ukraine and the Middle East, cooperation among authoritarian powers, and the possibility of war over Taiwan make the 1930s comparison tempting. Steve Palley and Galen Jackson work through where it helps and where it breaks down.

Nuclear weapons are the biggest difference. They make another march on Berlin hard to imagine, but they also make a confrontation over something a government considers essential far more dangerous. Deterrence might prevent a great-power war. It might also leave leaders gambling inside a crisis they cannot easily control.

Then there’s the question of who could actually fight. Drones are changing the battlefield, American interceptor supplies are strained, and China leads global manufacturing. The industrial advantage that helped the Allies win the last world war cannot simply be assumed this time. Neither can the ability of robots to make war less destructive.

The discussion ends with the United States. Would Americans fight to preserve their position, or try to sit the next conflict out? The current national security strategy still prioritizes Taiwan, even as it turns toward the Western Hemisphere. We also get into debt, the dollar, and whether a shift in economic power could settle the contest before the military question is answered.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit globaltantrum.substack.com

The United States and Canada have spent decades building one of the deepest economic relationships in the world. Cars and their components cross the border repeatedly, supply chains are tightly integrated, and the two countries traded about $872.3 billion in goods and services in 2025. Now Donald Trump is treating that interdependence as leverage rather than an alliance.

The immediate dispute is narrow but revealing. Washington imposed 50 percent tariffs on nearly $20 billion in Canadian vehicles, alcohol, and dairy after negotiations collapsed. Mark Carney recalled Canada’s team and promised dollar-for-dollar counter-tariffs on a broader group of American goods beginning September 8. The disagreement is not only about those products or French-language rules. It is about whether Canada remains free to set its own trade policy, including a new quota allowing up to 49,000 Chinese-made electric vehicles per year at the 6.1 percent most-favored-nation tariff.

We talk through why Carney chose confrontation, why the political costs may land in precisely the American states Trump needs before the midterms, and why tariffs are not a bill sent to a foreign government. They are collected from importers and, as recent Federal Reserve work shows, most of the burden falls on domestic firms and consumers.

The larger question is what replaces the trading system Trump is breaking. Galen discusses Lori Wallach’s Foreign Affairs article, “The Right Way to Balance Trade,” which proposes balanced trade, shared labor and environmental standards, and coordinated pressure on countries running persistent surpluses. The old order produced cheaper goods, but it also contributed to deindustrialization, concentrated corporate power, and brittle supply chains. Reform was overdue. Destruction is not the same thing as reform.

Canada may be smaller, but it is not behaving like a vassal. The episode asks whether Washington is gaining anything durable by humiliating its closest partner, and whether other countries will respond by accepting American leadership or by building a trading system that leaves the United States behind.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit globaltantrum.substack.com

The Houthis have declared a maritime blockade against Saudi-linked shipping in the Red Sea, attacked vessels near the Bab el-Mandeb, and renewed strikes on Saudi energy infrastructure. The immediate trigger was a July strike that disabled the runway at Sana’a airport as an Iranian flight attempted to land, but the confrontation rests on a much older Saudi-Houthi conflict.

We trace the Houthis from their roots in Yemen’s Zaydi community through the fall of Ali Abdullah Saleh, the seizure of Sana’a, and the Saudi-led war that failed to dislodge them. That history matters because the movement is not merely an Iranian unit operating abroad. It is locally embedded, increasingly capable of producing and adapting weapons, and able to exploit terrain that makes outside military victory extraordinarily difficult.

The strategic distinction is between controlling territory and controlling risk. The Houthis do not need to dominate the Red Sea to raise shipping costs, threaten Saudi export routes, or force much larger states to divert scarce defenses. The Bab el-Mandeb is valuable precisely because a relatively small force can impose consequences far beyond Yemen.

That helps explain why Iran’s regional network has survived repeated predictions of collapse. A recent Foreign Affairs analysis argues that the Axis of Resistance has become more decentralized, locally supplied, and resilient. China also complicates Western pressure by providing an alternative market and supply base even when it is acting from narrow commercial interests rather than ideological alignment.

This week, we ask what Saudi Arabia thought it could gain by reopening a front it could not win before, whether economic pressure can produce an off-ramp with Iran, and why accommodation may ultimately look more realistic than another round of bombing.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit globaltantrum.substack.com

Galen Jackson’s new War on the Rocks essay examines five regime-change campaigns, from Suez and Lebanon to Iraq, Libya, and Iran, and asks why outside powers keep making the same gamble.

The central mistake is confusing tactical success with political control. Great powers can destroy targets, topple governments, and kill leaders. They cannot manufacture legitimacy, national cohesion, or a stable replacement regime.

Why keep trying? Decapitation looks cheap and decisive, military superiority feels like political leverage, and occasional apparent successes in places such as Panama and Venezuela invite bad analogies. In the Middle East, nationalism, weak institutions, and rival intervention make the wager even worse.

We discuss Galen’s article, the failures from Iran in 1953 to Libya in 2011, the comparisons with Germany, Japan, and Latin America, and why the current Iran war shows that the old lesson still has not been learned.

Also in this episode: we talk about a quieter change in academic publishing. Peer-reviewed journals still reward rigor, but they are slow, expensive, and often inaccessible outside universities. Hybrid outlets such as War on the Rocks let scholars bring research-based arguments to policymakers and the public, though tenure incentives have not fully caught up. In an era of abundant opinion and declining trust in expertise, we argue that academics should engage more without abandoning the standards that make their expertise worth hearing.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit globaltantrum.substack.com

On July 3rd, C.Q. Brown, the Air Force general Trump fired as chairman of the Joint Chiefs in February 2025, published an essay in Foreign Affairs with Duke political scientist Peter Feaver, warning what happens when a country asks too much of its military. He never names Trump or Hegseth. He doesn't have to. In the sixteen months since Brown's dismissal, Pete Hegseth has fired or forced out more than a dozen general and flag officers, most recently Chris Donahue, the commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa, in June.

The American civil-military canon is built on a different kind of crisis. Truman and MacArthur, Lincoln and McClellan, Obama and McChrystal. Those were fights over strategy, with generals straining against civilian control. What's happening now is a different and potentially more serious problem. Nobody disputes that the Secretary of War has the authority to fire whomever he wants. The question is what it means when the firings are about composition rather than competence, and when the officers being removed keep turning out to share certain demographic characteristics.

Hegseth has been explicit that his priority is getting wokeness out of the military. But the deeper worry has less to do with him than with three conditions stacking up at once. First, a force that fewer than one percent of Americans serve in; second, a hyperpolarized country that has lost faith in nearly every other institution; and third, a formerly ironclad norm that the military should be apolitical that the civilian side keeps bending. The military is the last American institution both parties still respect. That is precisely what makes it worth capturing.

We discuss Hegseth’s 2025 Quantico spectacle and the silence that met it, why Huntington's clean separation of soldier and state was always something of a fiction, and why the thing to fear isn't a man on horseback but a citizenry that invites him in.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit globaltantrum.substack.com

The Iran war is winding down, but one front never closed. In southern Lebanon, Israel and Hezbollah are still trading fire, and it’s become one of the biggest sticking points left in the deal between Iran and the United States. The old question is back: what do you actually do about Hezbollah? What CAN you do?

Here’s what’s hard about Hezbollah: it is two things at once. On the one hand, it’s a Lebanese political party that holds seats in parliament and runs the clinics and schools the failing Lebanese state can’t. On the other, it’s an Iranian-built army sitting on tens of thousands of missiles, many now cheaply upgraded with GPS guidance, pointed at northern Israel. You can’t bomb away the second without reckoning with the first.

In the last few years, Israel has hit Hezbollah harder than ever: the 2024 pager attack, the assassination of longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah, supply lines severed when the Assad regime fell in Syria. And yet the organization persists. The only durable fix is political, and Lebanon’s sectarian deadlock makes that nearly impossible. So Israel is left “mowing the grass,” racking up tactical wins that never add up to a strategic one.

We trace Hezbollah from the rubble of Lebanon’s civil war to the Party of God of today, why Iran built it and won’t let go, and why beating Hezbollah on the battlefield may not be the same thing as winning.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit globaltantrum.substack.com

On June 14th, the U.S. and Iran signed a memorandum of understanding to end the Iran War. The Strait of Hormuz reopens, sanctions lift, and a $300 billion reconstruction fund is on the table. Iran got nearly everything it wanted. America got out. Trump marked the same day by turning 80 and hosting a UFC card on the White House lawn. Iran is off his radar, and he’s turned the keys over to JD Vance.

But the deal’s biggest loser isn’t Washington, it’s Jerusalem. Like the U.S. Israel got exactly none of its war aims: nothing on Iran’s regime, missiles, proxies, or uranium enrichment. And Vice President Vance followed up by delivering the bluntest public rebuke of an Israeli government in living memory. So if JD Vance is now holding the keys, Benjamin Netanyahu, titan of modern Israeli politics, is holding the bag.

Why does this matter? It’s very simple: the U.S. has an ocean and can (in theory) afford to not pay close attention to who is in charge of what in the Persian Gulf. This is very much not the case for Israel, whose mortal regional enemy has just been empowered. Plus, as American public opinion turns, with 60% now viewing Israel unfavorably, and young voters in both parties leading the shift, the strategic, political, and moral cases for continuing unconditional U.S. support for Israel are all eroding at once.

We dig into Netanyahu’s shrinking options, the precedents from Eisenhower to Bush that show how these U.S.-Israel breaches usually end, and why this one might be the first that actually sticks.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit globaltantrum.substack.com