This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Saturday, May 13th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Iran Deal, as far as it goes, appears to be working to prevent Iran from pursuing nuclear weapons, but that doesn't mean the United States won't stumble into greater conflict. Cato Institute Foreign Policy Scholars Emma Ashford and Ben Friedman discuss how the US should go about avoiding unnecessary fights

in the region.

The Iranian nuclear deal based upon our discussion, Ben, with John Glazer, is that there is some evidence that the Iran deal is working

going just by the rhetoric being used by US officials about what kind of threats Iran poses in the region and around the world.

But that Iran deal doesn't solve other problems that the United States has with Iran.

So what are those other problems and, you know, where might the U.S. be headed even with a working Iran deal in place?

Yeah, the purpose of the Iran deal is very limited to control,

limit, stop Iran's nuclear weapons development.

But to many people, myself included,

I think there's a broader purpose that's not articulated directly by the deals advocates because they don't want to oversell it, which is to keep the United States out of another stupid war in that part of the world or keep the United States from bombing Iran.

And there's a lot of hawks in this town who would, I think, like to have a war with Iran or at least wouldn't go far to avoid it.

And I think that would be potentially disastrous.

And so one virtue of the deal by stopping the program, the weapons program, is to make that war

less likely, but there's another virtue which is just to improve relations more broadly but there's

still problems. There's problems with Iran giving money to Hezbollah. There's problems with

Iran at least perceived problems with them supporting

Houthi rebels in Yemen, so it's not as if relations overnight turned peaceful and warm.

This was one of the sort of debates over the nuclear deal itself was it actually was just

a non-proliferation deal and the Obama administration was fairly clear publicly that they believed

it was just a non-proliferation deal it wasn't

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