Welcome back to Deconstructed. To kick off the new year, we're bringing you an extra

show this week. Today, we'll be talking to Trieda Parcy, Executive Vice President of

the Quincy Institute for Sustainable State Craft. It's a new foreign policy think tank

trying to push back on the Washington blob. Parcy is an author and a long time observer

of US-Aeron relations, and he's been growing increasingly alarmed at the possibility that

cornered Trump is attempting to launch an assault on Iran in his waning days. He joins

us now to talk about what he's been seeing and how we got where we are. Trieda Parcy,

welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me.

So we're talking today on Monday, January 4th, yesterday. So that would be Sunday, January

3rd. That was the first anniversary of the assassination of Kassam Soleimani. For people

who haven't followed this terribly closely, how did the US and Iran get in a situation

where an American president is assassinating an Iranian official in a Iraqi airport?

Well, it all started with Donald Trump becoming president and essentially having this obsession

of undoing whatever he considered to be President Barack Obama's legacy. And on the foreign policy

front, his biggest diplomatic victory was securing the Iran nuclear deal. That horrible stupid

deal, which Trump rallied against extensively during the presidential campaign.

When you look at this horrible deal that Obama made, that President Obama made with Iran,

it took him about a year before he managed to pull out of it because all of his advisors

at least the original team advised against it, recognizing the tremendous damage it would

do to US's reputation, but also the dangers it would create if the Iranians followed

suit and also left the agreement and restarted their program. But this is what Trump did.

And a year later, after pulling out a year later, he pushed to actually reduce Iran's

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