Hello and welcome to Background Briefing available 24-7 at Background Briefing.

I'm Ian Masters, and today we'll examine a number of stories and issues in the news.

We'll begin with reports that for weeks Trump has been desperate to make a deal with Iranian officials because he only cares about himself, not the country, and is eagerly accepting Iran's

terms to get out of the mess he has made without any regard to the consequences for the US, the region and the world.

Joining us to discuss how there are no specialists on Iran left in the government to inform a White House,

which has no interest in facts, that the theocrats running Iran see the preservation of the Islamic Republic

as their highest religious duty and

instead of freeing the Iranian people, Trump has strengthened this brutal repressive government

and elevated its position in the world. Joining us is Hussein Banai, an Iranian-American scholar

and professor of international relations at Indiana University

who teaches Iran's political development as well as US-Iran relations.

He's the author of Hidden Liberalism, Burdened Visions of Progress in Modern Iran,

and he has an article at Foreign Affairs.

We will discuss,

America and Israel have different end games in Iran.

Then we look into how Trump's defeat in his war of choice, in spite of American military

power, could be the beginning of liberating the US from a broken imperial model.

We will speak with James Galbraith, professor and chair

in government and business relations at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the

University of Texas at Austin. He was executive director of the Joint Economic Committee of the

United States Congress and before that an economist for the House Banking Committee. He chaired

the board of

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