On today’s briefing:
Facing a Choice to Escalate or Capitulate, Will Trump Listen to the JCS Chair and VP Telling Him We’ve Run Out of Ammo or Will Netanyahu Talk Trump Into Resuming Their War?
We begin with the U.S.- Iran war at a strategic dead end as Trump faces a choice of escalating or capitulating. With Netanyahu and Trump’s attendance at Senator Graham’s funeral on Tuesday an opportunity for Israel’s PM to invoke the late senator’s hawkish agenda and tug Trump in one direction, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the VP’s warning that U.S. stockpiles of weapons are running low is tugging our clueless president in the opposite direction. Joining us is Nader Hashemi, the Director of the Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding and a Professor of Middle East and Islamic Politics at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He is the author of The People Reloaded: The Green Movement and the Struggle for Iran’s Future and Sectarianization: Mapping the New Politics of the Middle East.
Could America’s Gen Z Learn From the Youthful Rebellion in India Against Their Autocratic Leader?
Then we examine the rise of youthful opposition to the autocratic rule of India’s PM following student rebellions that forced Modi’s Minister of Education to resign. Joining us to explore whether America’s Gen Z could take a cue from India’s student activists who are fighting to restore the world’s biggest democracy is Dr. Sumit Ganguly, the Director of the Huntington Program on Strengthening US – India Relations at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His books include India, Pakistan, and the Bomb: Debating Nuclear Stability in South Asia and his latest book is The Oxford Handbook of Indian Politics.
Could the New Cold War in the Hinterlands of Europe and Asia Lead to WWIII?
Then finally we assess whether World War III is underway and speak with Hannah Lucinda Smith, a writer, consultant and reporter for The Times of London and The Economist. A consistent Pulitzer grantee, she was The Times’ correspondent in Turkey and has reported on the Middle East, from inside rebel-held Syria, on the front lines of the battle against Isis in Iraq, and joined the mass movement of migrants on their journey to Europe in 2015. She is the author of Erdogan Rising: The Battle for the Soul of Turkey and the co-author of Zarifa. We discuss her new book, just out, Hinterlands: The New Cold War Brewing at the Peripheries of the West.
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