Day: March 9, 2026

A War Iran Only Has to Stay in While We Can Only Win At a Price We Are Unlikely to Want to Pay

We begin with the question, how long can Trump and Hegseth use $4 million interceptors to shoot down $20,000 drones in an asymmetrical war that Iran just has to stay in, while we can only win at a price we are unlikely to want to pay? Joining us is Nicholas Heras, Interim Executive Director at the Middle East Policy Council and Senior Director for Strategy & Innovation at the New Lines Institute. From 2016-2017, Nicholas served as the tenth 1LT Andrew J. Bacevich, Jr., USA Fellow at Center for New American Security and he has conducted an extensive study on Iran’s proxies in the Middle East for the National Defense University.

An Analysis of a Brutal Regime From Which the Iranian People Desperately Want to be Freed But Have No Power to Do So

Then we speak with an Iranian scholar who was imprisoned and interrogated by Iran’s IRGC to get an understanding of a brutal regime based on divine legitimacy from which the Iranian people desperately want to be freed, but have no power to do so. Joining us is Kian Tajbakhsh, an Iranian-American scholar, social scientist, and urban planner. He has taught at both American and Iranian universities and is a Presidential Fellow and Lecturer at Columbia University’s Committee on Global Thought and Professor of Urban Policy at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs and a Visiting Professor of International Relations at New York University. In his advocacy for democracy and human rights, he represented the Open Society Foundation in Iran during the 2000s and his commitment to pro-democracy efforts led to his arrest and imprisonment during Iran’s Green Movement protests in 2009. He was one of five Iranian-Americans held in Iran whose release was negotiated by the Obama administration as part of the Iran Nuclear Deal and he was finally permitted to leave in 2016. He is the author of, Creating Local Democracy in Iran: State-Building and the Politics of Decentralization, and he has an article at The Dispatch we discuss, “What is the Iranian Theocracy’s Future Now?“

A Lawless World Trump is Dragging Us Into Based on Force and His Whims 

Then finally we examine a lawless world Trump is plunging us into, based on force and subject to his whims, and speak with Oona Hathaway, a Professor of International Law at Yale Law School and a Nonresident Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She has been a member of the Advisory Committee on International Law for the Legal Adviser at the United States Department of State since 2005, and, from 2014 to 2015, she took leave to serve as Special Counsel to the General Counsel at the U.S. Department of Defense, where she was awarded the Office of the Secretary of Defense Award for Excellence. The coauthor with Scott Shapiro of The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World, she has a recent article at Foreign Affairs we discuss, “A World Without Rules: The Consequences of Trump’s Assault on International Law.”