🇾🇪 🇺🇸 Bombers took off from the UK and the bombs were already loaded when the Houthi strike got scrapped.
Fmr. director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center Joe Kent thinks a phone call with MBS set the machine in motion, with everyone listening in assuming a decision had been made:
“He wanted to say, yeah, you’re my friend, I’ll always be there for you. And all the people that listen in on the calls are like, oh crap, we better start preparing things.”
America already tried bombing the Houthis into collapse in 2025 and it failed, so the right move was walking away before they turn their attention from Saudi and Israeli ships onto American ones and shut the Bab el Mandeb completely.
@joekent16jan19
Video
Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal)🇺🇸🇮🇷 Witkoff and Kushner sat with the Iranians for three hours at the UN, and Tehran walked out repeating the exact terms it set in June
Iranian state television needed only minutes after the meeting to restate the price of reopening Hormuz: lift the naval blockade, release every frozen dollar now, and end the war on every front including Gaza.
Joe Kent ran the National Counterterrorism Center before he resigned over this war, and he reads that list as a return to the MOU the president already signed once.
Which produces his suggestion, offered with no expectation it happens:
“walk into the Iranian delegation and be like, deal accepted”
That would be the North Korea move, the kind of unpredictable act that once worked, and it would open the strait before the winter bills land.
The alternative on display was a speech pairing annihilation threats with talk of a deal after the fall, and Kent’s worry is that Washington keeps assuming Iran will sit still while it waits.
Iran has never sat still.
@joekent16jan19
Video
— https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/2102520133768089941
