Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi, everybody. Ian Bremmer here and a Quick Take to kick off your week. Of course it is the Middle East that we are first and foremost exercised about. Not the biggest topic in Europe for the Munich Security Conference. That was Navalny and Russia and Ukraine. But back in the United States and for most of the rest of the world, it is still the Middle East.

And that is in part because there is less optimism about an imminent deal on the remaining hostages, which has led the Israeli government to step up the pressure, saying if you don't give all of the hostages back, in short order, that they're going to engage in ground warfare against Rafah, where over a million Palestinians are sheltering, if we can call it that, having already been resettled from other parts in the rest of Gaza, and they have nowhere to go.