Donald Trump’s strongman style of politics could drag the US into yet another war in the Middle East, this time with Iran. In his attempts at striking a deal with the Islamic Republic, Trump laid out two options: talk to us directly (Iran still maintains the talks are ‘indirect’), or we will bomb you like never before. According to Trump, Iran went with the former just this week.
“A lot of countries, including the Iranians, are discounting a lot of those threats,” says Iranian-American relations expert Trita Parsi, who joins Mehdi on the show, “not in the sense that they don't take them seriously, they're preparing, but they understand that that's part of the noise that Trump seems to want to do.”
Speaking of what Trump wants to do, Mehdi asks Parsi how much of the desire to go to war with Iran is American and how much of it is Israeli. “I find it very unlikely that there is any other force even close to that of Netanyahu driving this at this point,” he says, adding that Israel’s approach to dealing with Iran is not limited to a single blow.
“They [Israel] never said that there is a military one-time solution. They've all along said that it would entail repeated attacks over the course of years.” Israel’s war in Gaza has also seen Israel attack Iranian allies all over the region, from Syria to Lebanon to Yemen. Mehdi asks Parsi how much weaker that leaves the Islamic Republic in the face of a possible US/Israel-sponsored assault on Iran.
“On the nuclear front, they [Iran] have much more leverage than they did before… Israelis asked for two THAAD battery systems, which is the most advanced anti-air missile system that exists in the world. They wouldn't have done that if the Iranians were not successful,” Parsi explains.
If you’re a paid subscriber, you can watch the full interview above to hear Mehdi challenge Parsi on whether it may have been too early for him to suggest earlier this year that Trump was engaged in “peace efforts” in the Middle East.
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