column saying if you were the president of the united states you may not care about the middle east, but the middle east cares about you. rick, you care about the middle east. you have deep contacts there. what do you think the u.s. position is in the region there. shannon was alluding to the jared kushner effort to end the conflict there in the last few years, that obviously didn t happen. what s our role there? what should it be? garrett, it s a good question. i think what we re seeing is a kind of first thing s first, back to basics diplomacy. they don t want to get involved. as shannon mentioned, the trump people boasted on day one about the grand bargain and the idea that biden and blinken are looking at us and let s do the things that we can do and let s settle the things down that need to be settled. we don t need to do some grand bargain. we need to just make sure that people are stable. in fact, that was the phrase that biden used about the relationship with russia. we want