The Houthi Threat to Red Sea Shipping, With Katherine Zimmerman

LINDSAY:
Welcome to The President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States. I'm Jim Lindsay, director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is the Houthi threat to Red Sea shipping.
With me to discuss the ongoing attacks by the Houthis in Yemen on commercial ships transiting the Red Sea is Katherine Zimmerman. Katherine is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where she focuses on terrorist movements in the Middle East, the Horn of Africa, and the Sahel. She also advises AEI's critical threats project. She recently co-wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal titled "Washington Can't Let the Houthis Take Yemen." Katherine, thank you for joining me.

ZIMMERMAN:
I am so glad to be here today.

LINDSAY:
I want to begin by noting that it's a fluid situation in the Red Sea at the moment. Things could change by the time this podcast airs. But if we may, Katherine, I'd like to start with the basics. Who are the Houthis? Who I should note also go by the name of Ansar Allah?

ZIMMERMAN:
Yes. The Houthis are a Zaydi Shia group that seized power in Yemen in fall of 2014, and the Cliffs Notes version is that today they receive significant Iranian support, both in weapons provision, training, and I would also add essentially developing them as a mini-state within Yemen, giving them the diplomatic training, the media training, the ability to control a greater population. The real issue with the Houthis is that they started off as an opposition group that had legitimate grievances, and that's where I think when you hear about them. There's a dichotomy of the Houthis are this Iranian proxy-like Lebanese Hezbollah that is taking over the Yemeni state or other people frame them as an opposition group that rightly seized power, that is advancing the Yemeni cause. And today, they lean so much closer to Lebanese Hezbollah. They see themselves as a partner of the Iranian regime.

LINDSAY:
Okay. When you introduced your discussion of the Houthis, you said something that I think is worth dwelling on for a moment. You said that they were Zaydi Shia. Can you just briefly, maybe, give us a Cliffs Notes version of what Zaydi Shiism means and how it compares with the version of Shiism that is practiced in Iran?

ZIMMERMAN:
The key difference between Zaydi Shiism and the type of Shiism practiced in Iran is the Zaydis are known as Fivers, the Iranians known as Twelvers. Essentially, the Iranians are waiting for the 12th Imam to reappear. The Zaydis don't recognize that at all. So unlike Hezbollah, the Zaydis and actually the Houthis don't see the Iranian supreme leader as their religious leader. They see Abdul Malik al-Houthi as their religious leader, and the relationship is not one at all based on religious doctrine.

LINDSAY:
Okay, so when we're thinking about the Houthi relationship with Tehran, it's really a political relationship rather than a theological one.

ZIMMERMAN:
Right. Certainly there's similarities, and I think as you look at how the practice of Zaydism in Yemen has changed since the Houthis have taken power, there are elements of how the Iranians practice becoming more prominent in what the Houthis are doing. So they're transforming Zaydism, but really, they do not see themselves as part of the same actual sect as the Iranians.

LINDSAY:
One other basic question about the Houthis, my understanding is that the Houthis take their name from the fact that the early leaders and, I guess, existing leader were drawn from the Houthi clan within Yemen, but that the membership of the Houthi movement is not restricted to members of the Houthi tribe. Is that correct?

ZIMMERMAN:
That is correct. And it's why the Houthis, they don't refer themselves by that name. They call themselves Ansar Allah, as you mentioned, Partisans of God, and they really do see themselves as a manifestation of the return of Zaydism to Yemen.

LINDSAY:
Help me understand how we get from that to the fact that the Houthis have begun firing on shipping going through what is known as the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, which also goes by the name of the Gate of Grief or the Gate of Tears. It connects the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean more broadly to the Red Sea, which means the Suez Canal, which means the Mediterranean. So obviously, a critical commercial waterway in terms of global commerce. What are the Houthis trying to accomplish by firing at container ships going through Bab-el-Mandeb?

ZIMMERMAN:
Well, let me just start by saying, the crisis in the Red Sea and the Bab-el-Mandeb is certainly making many strategists and analysts in pain and in tears over this strait and waterway. But the Houthis are acting both in their own interests and in that of Iran's. And I think that's key to point out that even if Iran were removed from this equation, the Houthis would be continuing to disrupt the commercial shipping. What they see here is an opportunity to galvanize support amongst the Yemeni people for their actions. Missed from the media actually is how unpopular the Houthis were in September, just before the October 7th attack. So they're using this as a way to deflect criticism and get popular support around a common external enemy.

LINDSAY:
This is their popular support in Yemen?

ZIMMERMAN:
In Yemen, yes. Most Yemenis are not Houthis, even those who live under Houthi control. Many of them don't support the Houthi regime. But if you talk to analysts who study the Houthis carefully, this is a group that has ruled through coercive measures and has really created a system where you have to buy in in order to survive. They have cut down on social opposition, detained activists, tortured individuals, and it's not really talked about, but they have moved Yemeni society toward a fundamentalist understanding of Zaydism, restricting the rights of women, removing them from public space. Everything that we talk about in Afghanistan that the Taliban are doing, the Houthi are also doing in Yemen. We just don't talk about it.
So pulling back from that problem, the Houthis are not well-liked, and as the war was beginning to wrap up, we've had a ceasefire in Yemen for about two years now, Special Envoy Tim Lenderking has been busy trying to get to a ceasefire between the Houthis and Saudi Arabia, and the absence of war has given the space for Yemenis to start to resist the Houthis. There's a major anniversary of the Yemen Revolution on September 21 that Yemenis turned out in droves to celebrate, and the Houthis cracked down on that, the actual reason they were on the losing side of that war. But that crackdown is just emblematic of something that the Houthis were beginning to be concerned about, and that's the growing voices of dissent within areas of their control. Those have disappeared now after the Houthis have leaned fully into support for the Palestinians and Hamas and to strike against Israel and the United States. This is a war that they are baiting America to come and join because any strikes on Yemen creates this war between the Yemenis and the big bad West.

LINDSAY:
Should we make anything of the fact that the slogan of Ansar Allah is, "God Is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse Upon the Jews, Victory to Islam"?

ZIMMERMAN:
We should. It is one of the first indicators of the Iranian influence, but it's also clear positioning for the Houthis in terms of what their ideology and objectives are. They are revisionists. They want to change the status quo. They believe that the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979 is a model that they should follow to throw off American influence, to change the balance of power in the region. And to do that, it is anti-American, anti-Israeli, and ultimately, they want to see their form of Islam, this very conservative fundamentalist idea within Zaydism, triumph.

LINDSAY:
So help me understand the logic of attacking the shipping that the Houthis have targeted with their rockets and missiles because most of the ships that have been attacked aren't going to Israel, aren't delivering goods to Israel. So you're having the Houthis attack just random shipping. What is the thinking underlying that process? Are the Houthis hoping that they're going to persuade like-minded individuals near other global waterways to follow suit and do the same thing, paralyze the global economy? Is it just random? Is it this mere act of firing and saying you're firing to show support for Hamas? That is the key operative here? Is it part of some specific plan, battle plan perhaps that the Iranians have that have persuaded the Houthis to take up?

ZIMMERMAN:
So they have two different audiences, and one, of course, is their domestic audience, who are getting their information primarily from the Houthis and the sources of information that are allowed to come in as, of course, there's some flow through WhatsApp and Telegram and conversations. But the media space in much of Yemen is dominated by some of the Houthi apparatus, so it doesn't matter.

LINDSAY:
So they get to tell their own story.

ZIMMERMAN:
Yes, it doesn't matter whether or not the ship is going to Israel passing through, but it's part of the global system that is beneficial toward Israel and, of course, harming the Palestinian cause per the Houthis. So I think that's one aspect of this. And I think the other side of that is, looking at the impact on the international community, clearly this is the strike at the global economy. We're starting to see the effects today. We have major shipping companies, Maersk, etc., going around the Cape of Africa, which adds significant time and cost to shipping. So that will be delays in the delivery of goods as well as the diversion around the Red Sea. And the Houthis are sending a message to the United States, to the rest of the world that they are the authority in Yemen, that they control these waterways, and that they need to be recognized as such. Their aim here is to be recognized as the Yemeni state.

LINDSAY:
Now, explain to me what role you think the Iranians are playing in this. Do you think they're simply cheering the Houthis on? Do you think they're encouraging them? Do you think maybe they're giving the Houthis direction? How do we understand that part of the puzzle?

ZIMMERMAN:
I wish I knew it more clearly, but what I can say is that the Iranians are almost certainly providing the Houthis with intelligence. The Iranians have had a cargo ship parked in the Red Sea since the start of the war. The Israelis actually struck it with a limpet mine, so a sea mine that they attached to the bottom of the ship, I think in 2017, and the Iranians simply replaced the vessel. So they have a new mothership there that is providing intelligence and goods to the Houthis. So basically, a floating base that is not a military target in the Red Sea. That, to me, means that the Houthis are receiving direct intelligence. This is not just encouraged but enabled by Iran.

LINDSAY:
I want to parse through the significance of the Houthi attacks. You've written that the actions of the Houthis amount to a strategic threat to the United States. How so?

ZIMMERMAN:
It's about the global economy, and this is something that I feel has been missed in the discussion in Washington in particular, where we want to deal with the Houthis as a Yemen problem. They're a nuisance. They're this projection of some Iranian force power. But really, we can just chalk them off to this Yemen thing. The events of the past couple of months have shown how much impact they can have on the global economy, and if you look at U.S. national security interests, it has to do with freedom of the seas and free trade. And someone pointed out that we lost the Suez Canal during the Suez War, and that was fine. Fifty years later, things are different. We have 15 percent of commerce going. When the Ever Given was stuck in the Suez Canal during COVID, for those who remember this drama that played out in Egypt, it was $10 billion a day that was lost. So you start to add that up. Significant impact for the United States in terms of what's coming to our East Coast, and I would say, more consequences what's going into Europe since they use that much more frequently than the United States does.

LINDSAY:
So Katherine, how do you respond to arguments from people like Alan Beattie of the Financial Times who say, "Yes, this is a nuisance. It is driving up shipping costs. It's clearly driving up insurance costs, but neither of those are anywhere near the stratospheric heights that we saw in 2021 and 2022 as we came out of the COVID lockdown." So they argue that it's hard to see how this is going to disrupt the global economy in the way that you've just laid out.

ZIMMERMAN:
I'm not an expert on the global economy, but just some snippets that I've heard. One of the other key transit points is the Panama Canal, which is simply not functioning the way that it used to. They don't have enough water.

LINDSAY:
Yeah, a major drought in Central America, Panama, means that water levels are down and has really impeded another major choke point in the global shipping lanes.

ZIMMERMAN:
Yeah, so you're talking about multiple restrictions across multiple points, particularly again for the East Coast, and it's going to drive up costs. As we're thinking back on the emphasis on supply chain diversity and being able to be self-sufficient, this is another way that an actor is chipping away at what the United States can do. It also means that should something flare up in the Indian Ocean or maybe we want to move something through to India to enhance posture in the Pacific, we have much more of a challenge going the shortest route between the East Coast, and, let's say, Karachi, Pakistan.

LINDSAY:
So let's talk about the response from the United States and others to the Houthi attacks. Back in December, I think on December 18, the Pentagon rolled out something called Operation Prosperity Guardian. It's a coalition made up of, I guess, a dozen or so countries, including the United Kingdom, Bahrain, Canada, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain. If I've left anyone else out, I apologize. Can you help us understand what the rules of engagement and the objective is of Operation Prosperity Guardian, Katherine?

ZIMMERMAN:
It's defensive, and what they're looking to do is to help protect the commercial vessels that are moving through the Red Sea, which means that the more maritime assets the coalition has, the faster they're able to respond to distress calls and hopefully serve as a deterrent. And I say hopefully because I do think that is a pipe dream.

LINDSAY:
Is there any evidence that it's worked as a deterrent?

ZIMMERMAN:
Not at all. In fact, the opposite, where we've seen increased strikes and increased complexity of the attacks. The one thing that isn't happening, which I think has also been dropped, is the Houthis actually seized one of the cargo ships and are still holding it captive. So they have hostages inside of Yemen. At this point, the Houthis have been unable to board and unable to bring a ship in. So in that sense, there is that deterrence, but it's not anywhere near what we thought it would do. It looks great on paper, but when you start to think about the inability of the United States to actually bring its partners to bear on this problem, there are remarkable absences from that list, countries that should be there.

LINDSAY:
Tell me about that.

ZIMMERMAN:
There are no Egyptians. It's in Egypt's interest for there to be traffic going through the Suez Canal. That is a moneymaker for the Egyptian government, and the Egyptians are absent from this. The Saudis are absent. The Emiratis are absent. So there are multiple regional partners that have remained on the outside of the coalition, in part because there's this idea that if you poke the Houthis, they're going to poke back, and we're going to get back to a hot war inside of Yemen.

LINDSAY:
Well the Saudis and the Emiratis intervened in Yemen, and that was not a positive experience for either Riyadh or Abu Dhabi.

ZIMMERMAN:
Correct. I think it was much worse for Riyadh. Abu Dhabi was able to achieve, actually, some significant successes on the ground, but they were well short of winning the war. And I can talk through why, but fundamentally, it was some American decisions about not supporting certain Emirati actions, the partners that the Emiratis had, and, of course, balancing humanitarian concerns with this desire to move the Houthis out of power.

LINDSAY:
And I should note the Houthis have used the rockets and missiles to hit targets in Saudi Arabia. So I can see why the Saudis are concerned about, as you put it, poking the Houthis on this score. Talk to me about other countries that are not involved. I haven't heard or seen anything about the role being played by China. China is a global superpower. China exports to the world. It is the number one trading partner of more than 140 countries around the globe. China has built up a blue-water navy. One would think that China would have an interest in making sure goods leaving Chinese factories can go through internationally recognized waterways. What are the Chinese doing here?

ZIMMERMAN:
The Chinese Navy is there. They have, I think, three ships in the Red Sea or so, and they are either free riding on the coalition to provide security and/or watching, and waiting, and learning. And I think this is something that the U.S. military is particularly concerned about, is the Chinese efforts over the years, and I think this time is no different than before, of watching how the United States reacts to threats, how we respond, defend ourselves, and what our tactics, techniques, and procedures are so that they can either learn from it and implement it themselves or learn how to counter it for a future conflict, say, over the Strait of Taiwan.

LINDSAY:
Okay. So the Chinese are there, but they're not part of Operation Prosperity Guardian. Correct?

ZIMMERMAN:
They're not part of it at all. And Chinese ships that have been in the vicinity of distress calls have not responded. Some people who know the Chinese military much better than I said that a reason might be that their capabilities are much less. And, of course, failure is just not an option in China.

LINDSAY:
Or it may be that they can't act unless they get permission from Beijing, and that may be a rather long and complicated process. So by the time the permission comes in, it's too late to do much of anything. Given that the Iranians likely have a role here, do we see any signs that the Chinese are reaching out to their good friends in Tehran to ask the Iranians to moderate and pull the Houthis back? Because obviously, another way to deal with this threat is to persuade the Houthis, either directly or indirectly, that it's not in their interest to continue do so, this diplomacy can work. Any sign that the Chinese are doing that?

ZIMMERMAN:
I haven't seen it, but I've honestly been swamped following just the dynamics within the Red Sea itself and haven't been able to look for the diplomatic outreach from China.

LINDSAY:
Yeah, I haven't seen it either. I was just curious if it had crossed your desk. Obviously, as you look at the threat that the Houthis pose to international shipping, and we can again argue about how significant those consequences will be, there is a question of who should be responsible for responding. And I can imagine a lot of Americans sort of thinking about this, would say, "Why is it up to the United States to respond?" As you pointed out, Katherine, a lot of this traffic going through the Red Sea, the Suez Canal matters a lot to countries like Egypt and countries in Europe because they're the recipients of the goods. So why aren't they taking the lead? Why is it that it's the USS Eisenhower aircraft carrier group that is the big dog setting the tone here with Operation Prosperity Guardian?

ZIMMERMAN:
Part of the reason the Europeans haven't stepped up is they just don't have the navies that they used to, and the Ukraine war and some of the recent conflicts have revealed how hollow some of the European defenses and militaries have become over the years as they've gutted their defense budgets. And I just need to make a note here that, with this conflict, with the various demands on the U.S. Navy, that we are going to rapidly see some of the own effects on our own ships. We held the Eisenhower out for an additional two months on its main deployment, and that probably cuts down on its time back in berth and repairs, and it means that the ship gets run down much faster. So there's this logistics and maintenance side, not just about ships on the water, but ships that are prepared and keeping them maintained. That, I think, gets missed when we talk about the strength of the U.S. or the strength of the Europeans. Yes, it would be lovely if the Europeans had what they needed to be able to do this, but I think given the force that the U.S. has, the fact that we were already in the region, that we had the aircraft carriers either nearby or on route, and we were able to respond much more quickly and frankly take the lead on this, which few can lead an international coalition like the United States can.

LINDSAY:
So let's talk about next steps. Where do you come down on what it is the Biden administration should do next? Do we continue the policy as is? Do we begin to attack Houthi targets? Do we do something else? What are your policy recommendations?

ZIMMERMAN:
So Ken Pollack and I just published a recommendation that seems to break out of that binary framing of do nothing and simply absorb the attacks and defend against them or conduct retaliatory strikes against the Houthi military. And what we pushed for has been attacking the Houthis where we think the Houthis will hurt most. The Houthis really do value their power and control of Yemen. And every single time that is threatened, they respond rapidly and aggressively to defend it, which means that going after the Houthis' strength on the ground is going to be the most effective way to get them to change their course of action.

LINDSAY:
Okay, so you want to threaten the Houthis' control on power as a way to get them to change their behavior. So that leads to a couple of questions, and let me do them sequentially. The first question is, why not just attack the Houthis, hit their targets, hit their leadership, make them pay a very heavy price? Because that seems to me to be the most common policy recommendation that I hear. What's wrong with that?

ZIMMERMAN:
It certainly is a common recommendation, and the challenges with it are that those strikes are going to have little effect on what the Houthis are actually doing. The Houthis have dispersed their weapons caches across Yemen, so there isn't a single military site that we can strike that will obliterate what they have. They're also putting them smartly near civilian sites, which increases the risk of civilian casualties, and the U.S. military is very alive to a proportional response and ensuring that we protect civilian lives as much as possible.
The Houthi leadership, same problem. They are in populated areas. They take a lot of effort to keep themselves surrounded, and as of yet, I don't actually believe that they are considered to be a legitimate strike target. And so for those reasons and the fact that you can look back at 2015, 2016, even 2017, Saudi Arabia was running a terribly run, aggressive bombing campaign on Yemen, hitting Houthi military targets, killing a lot of civilians in the process, and the Houthis have still emerged as the most powerful faction. So a complete U.S. air campaign against the Houthis may have been more effective than the Saudis, but why would we think that there'd be any different result?

LINDSAY:
Okay, so you're skeptical of the military option or the direct military option on the grounds that the Houthis don't present a target-rich environment, poor country. They don't have big weapons systems that, if you took it out, it would cripple their military and the rest. What about the opposite recommendation, which is that United States essentially should treat this as an annoyance and just strike back or take out Houthi ships or vessels that may try to attack international shipping but otherwise not escalate it? I will note that when we began this conversation, you suggested that the Houthis actually want to be attacked because that will rally people to their side. So I guess the argument for standing pat is, don't give the Houthis what they want. What's wrong with that policy recommendation?

ZIMMERMAN:
The problem with that is, it's also what the Houthis want because they spin that into a victory, and it feeds into this narrative that they have that over the past twenty years they have been marching toward victory, and that is part of their ethos, part of their ideology. So I think there's that challenge. And then the second challenge is, I spent a little bit of time talking about the U.S. Navy and why we don't have more European partners there, but that's a tax on the various militaries around the world to continue to defend that shipping lane from these pestering attacks. The Houthis are going to get more sophisticated over time or go the opposite, get more rudimentary, but throw more off. And the cost imposed is not just defending each commercial vessel going through and providing them with anti-drone technology, but it's going to be keeping U.S. naval assets, intelligence, and hard power in the region to ensure that this threat is fully disrupted at a time when we're still trying to pivot to Asia.

LINDSAY:
So it sounds like you're describing a situation in which the Houthis say, "Heads, we win, tails, you lose."

ZIMMERMAN:
Pretty much.

LINDSAY:
They'll spin the story whichever way to justify what they're doing and to rally support. Okay, so let me take up your recommendation. Again, you wrote this piece in the Wall Street Journal with Ken Pollack. How do you go after Houthi power? Can you do it at an acceptable cost? And why do we believe it'll work?

ZIMMERMAN:
So, the way to go after Houthi power is to bolster and support the Yemeni government and the forces that it has that are actively fighting the Houthis. These have been engaged in the fight since 2015. They made significant advances when the Emiratis were pushing with them, and there are reasons to believe that the Emirati effort could have been more successful had some different scenarios played out. It's not putting U.S. boots on the ground to fight the war ourselves. And I think that's something that Ken and I would both try to make clear. This is financial support to the Yemeni government, robust political support beyond what we're doing now, and some of the military training that will help the Yemeni militias move, as well as some of the assets that give them an edge over the Houthis, enabling them to geolocate radio frequencies and target that site. Some of these things that I hear are commercially available but may not be an option right now for the Yemenis because of the entry-level price of them.

LINDSAY:
And how successful do you think that strategy is going to be? It seems to be a strategy of saying to the Houthis, "You're making life difficult for us. We're going to make life really difficult for you by funding your enemies."

ZIMMERMAN:
There's precedent for success. Ken and I point to the situation in Libya with Gaddafi, where Gaddafi was doing all sorts of bad things in the world, funding, terrorism, etc., until we made Chad a real problem for him, and he got the message and rolled back in. Obviously, the Houthis are not Gaddafi for many reasons, but the reasons that there's potential for success is in 2018, when the Houthis thought that they were going to lose their major port city, Hudaydah. This is the place where 80 percent of commercial goods come into Yemen. So there was concern over fighting in Hudaydah, exacerbating the humanitarian crisis, as well as the Houthis recognizing that this would've been a more decisive military blow to them than almost anything else. That's their main connection to the outside world, and they went straight to the negotiating table. Brilliant negotiators have managed to get an agreement that still hasn't been implemented six years later, but the next time that they felt a real challenge, same thing. They held up the white flag and said, "Let's negotiate." And it's very clear that they respond to hard power, but they also are alive to the fact that the factions under the Yemeni government, unless they have external support and some unifying mission, aren't going to come together to present a real threat to the Houthis.

LINDSAY:
Katherine, are there any downsides, or unintended consequences, or risks that might come with providing greater support to the government in Yemen?

ZIMMERMAN:
Always. There is, of course, the chance that this might not work or that the Yemenis themselves don't want to do the fighting. So that is, of course, the big concern of reigniting the Yemeni Civil War, which had catastrophic consequences for Yemeni civilians. I think the other part of this is that it will divert U.S. attention from other priorities. The argument to start here is that when we're looking at the Middle East, it starts to chip away and contain the bigger problem, which is Iran's ability to exert power and threaten the US and our partners across that region. So we remove the force projection power from Yemen. We actually start to creep back and reestablish our own sphere of influence and space as a security guarantor that Iran has managed to steal away from us.

LINDSAY:
That raises an obvious question, which is why isn't the policy recommendation given the situation we face in the Bab-el-Mandeb, to go after Iran if Iran is indeed the source of this problem and Houthis are only able to act because Iran makes it possible for them to do so?

ZIMMERMAN:
I know the Iran hawks would love for me to say that we should go after Iran, but in this case, that's not going to really change what's going on in the Red Sea. And that comes back to the fact that the Houthis are not a subordinate partner. They view themselves as an equal partner. They're autonomous in their actions. Yes, the Iranians have provided them with all of the capabilities that they've been able to generate, have been part of the reason why they've been so successful. But the Iranians have transferred the ability to build most of these weapons in sight. The Houthis have built their own procurement networks. Many of the one-way drones are actually commercially available, so it's not even Iranian to begin with. And so when you start to look at what the Houthis are doing and how they're doing it, yes, there's the Iranian hand. But the Iranians molded the Houthis in a way that they won't fall apart when the Iranian hand disappears.

LINDSAY:
And I would imagine any attacks on Iran also raised bigger risks of escalation broader Middle East War, and the game in that sense may not be worth the candle.

ZIMMERMAN:
Certainly, and there's this omnipresent Iranian nuclear threat that is in the back of every Israeli mind and certainly ever present for U.S. officials working in this space.

LINDSAY:
On that note, we're going to close up The President's Inbox for this week. My guest has been Katherine Zimmerman, a fellow at AEI. Katherine, thank you very much for joining me.

ZIMMERMAN:
So great to be here, and thank you for the discussion.

LINDSAY:
Please subscribe to The President's Inbox on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you listen, and leave us a review. We love the feedback. The publications mentioned in this episode and a transcript of our conversation are available on the podcast page for The President's Inbox on CFR.org. As always, opinions expressed on The President's Inbox are solely those of the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters and policy.
Today's episode was produced by Molly McAnany, with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. Special thanks out to Michelle Kurilla for her research assistance. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.