In this special episode of The Inside Brief with Manus Cranny, former US National Security Agency chief Tim Haugh joins us in London to talk about the cyber dimensions of the Iran war and regional escalation, including an attack on the UAE's nuclear power plant.

Mr Haugh argues that the US is seeking conditions for a political settlement focused on freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz and the removal of enriched uranium from Iran, while Tehran aims to apply pressure through attacks on regional infrastructure.

He says meaningful pressure would likely require Islamic Revolutionary guard Corps-focused targets, though few may compel compromise. After US President Donald Trump’s Beijing visit, Mr Haugh says the level of Chinese support for Iran remains unclear.

He also says Iran’s capacity has likely degraded and resembles criminal opportunism, while artificial intelligence is accelerating the discovery of vulnerabilities and driving investment needs, alongside new physical defence priorities for data centres.

Bond markets are sending signals that politicians are struggling to read. Former Bank of England governor Sir Mervyn King joins The Inside Brief with Manus Cranny from London to make sense of them, drawing on a 22-year career at the institution and a decade as governor during some of the most turbulent periods in modern financial history.

On the current state of UK gilt markets and rising long-term yields, Mr King argues that a 10-year bond yield of 5 per cent is not unusual in itself. What concerns him more is the deep political reluctance across major economies to put public debt on a sustainable path. The choice, he says, is straightforward: either cut spending or raise taxes.

On the oil shock, Mr King warns that the impact on inflation will be very different depending on whether the Middle East conflict lasts weeks, months or longer, and that central banks cannot yet know how much of it they can afford to look through. He draws on his own experience at the Bank of England after the financial crisis, when the institution looked through the biggest devaluation of sterling since the Second World War, and explains the conditions under which those judgments on interest rates were made.

In the conversation, Mr King also reflects on the City of London, the closeness of relationships between the world's major central banks, and the charity he cofounded in 2005, Chance to Shine, which has brought cricket into state schools and reached eight million children.

The Iran war has put pressure on businesses headquartered in the UAE, but Kaan Terzioglu, chief executive of Dubai-based multinational telecommunication and digital services company Veon is not among those pulling back.

Speaking to The Inside Brief with Manus Cranny from the company's Dubai offices, Mr Terzioglu says he is a hundred per cent sure Dubai will come out of this even stronger, and that the ability to access capital and talent is not at risk.

Veon operates across some of the world's most challenging frontier markets, from Pakistan and Bangladesh to Ukraine and Kazakhstan, serving half a billion people across its telecoms and digital services platforms.

Mr Terzioglu describes Veon not as a mobile operator but as a consumer and enterprise services company which happens to have a telecom licence.

Today, 75 per cent of the business comes from traditional telecom services, growing at seven to eight per cent year-on-year. The remaining 25 per cent, covering banking, entertainment, healthcare and ride hailing, grows at 60 per cent year-on-year. Mr Terzioglu expects digital services revenue to exceed telecom revenue within three years.

On the Iran war, Mr Terzioglu draws on experience managing a business through the Russia-Ukraine conflict, when 70 per cent of Veon's revenue came from a war zone overnight. The company had 19,000 people in Russia and 4,000 in Ukraine and had to make a defining choice. They chose Ukraine and exited Russia, losing half the business. Today, Veon is still growing and profitable in Ukraine.

On AI, Veon is building sovereign large language models in local languages including Bangla, Urdu, Punjabi, Kazakh and Ukrainian, working with governments to access trainable data and taking around nine months to build each core model. Mr Terzioglu's ambition is not cost cutting but augmentation. He calls AI the recipe for becoming a superhero and says that those who are late to adapt risk being left behind.

During the conversation, Mr Terzioglu also shared some personal reflections. Growing up in Istanbul during the hyperinflationary environment of the 1970s and 1980s, trading Deutsche marks on the black market, taught Mr Terzioglu one fundamental rule for operating in frontier markets: pricing control.