Hello and welcome to Background Briefing, available 247 at Backgroundbriefing.org, I'm

and Masters.

And today we'll examine a number of stories and issues in the news.

We'll begin with a shaky ceasefire containing an explosive hair-trigger situation in the Persian

Gulf as Iran's blockade and the U.S. blockade bump up against each other with diplomacy on hold

and uncertainty over who actually speaks for Iran if and when negotiations are to take place.

Joining us is Jennifer Kavanaugh, a senior fellow and director of military analysis at defense priorities,

where her research focuses on U.S. military strategy, force structure and defense budgeting,

the defense industrial base, and U.S. military

deployments and interventions.

Previously, she was a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Canadian

Endowment for International Peace, and we will discuss her article at the New York Times,

Iran's leaders can afford to be patient.

Then we'll look into Trump's use of assassination against heads of state,

which was banned under President Ford, but has come back to haunt us in Iran,

with an even harder-aligned leadership emerging from the U.S.-Israeli strike on the first day of the war.

We will assess how much this more radical leadership

might want to get their hands on a nuclear weapon as soon as possible, and speak with James

Ziren, a former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, and the host of the

critically acclaimed television talk so conversations with Jim Ziren, which airs on PBS.

He's the author of Supremely Partisan, How Raw Politics Steps to Scales, in the United States Supreme Court,

and Plaintiff in Chief, a portrait of Donald Trump in 3,500 lawsuits,

...