Background Briefing: April 20, 2026

On By asher

Uncertainty Over Talks to End the War on Iran Before the Ceasefire Deadline Expires

We begin with the uncertainty of talks in Pakistan to negotiate an exit for a war Trump started and appears desperate to end before a ceasefire between the US, Israel and Iran expires on Wednesday. With growing doubt about who is really in charge in Iran and a delusional Trump posting today that “I’m winning a War, BY A LOT” and that “things are going very well”, we speak with 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. A Non-Resident Fellow at Democracy for the Arab World Now, 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.

 

The CIA’s Legacy of Blowback Where, But For Their 1953 Coup, Iran Would be a Thriving, Secular Democratic State Today

Then we examine the CIA’s legacy of blowback particularly in Iran where, but the coup they engineered against a democratically-elected government, we would have in Iran today a thriving secular democratic state in the middle of an unstable region dominated by military thugs and Islamist religious fanatics. Joining us to discuss a new documentary about the Jewish James Bond Peter Sichel, The Last Spy, is Stephen Kinzer, an award-winning foreign correspondent who served as the New York Times Bureau chief in Turkey, Germany, and Nicaragua and as the Boston Globe’s Latin America correspondent. He is a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University and is the author of All the Shah’s Men, Overthrow, and The Brothers, John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles and their Secret World War. His latest book is Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control and he has an article at The Boston Globe, “Trump should have listened to Obama about Iran”

 

Palantir’s Manifesto as a Technofascist Doctrine 

Then finally we assess a manifesto from the Silicon Valley defense contractor Palantir which has scholars of authoritarianism alarmed at what they see as a “technofascist” doctrine. Joining us is Fred Turner,  the Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University. He is the author or co-author of five books including Seeing Silicon Valley: Life inside a Fraying America, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties,  From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and The Rise of Digital Utopianism, and Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory.