Hello and welcome to Background Briefing, available 24-7 at Background Briefing.org. I'm Ian Masters.

And today on this Christmas Day, we will speak with James Carroll, the author of many books about religion, politics and history, his memoir of the Vietnam War and American Requiem, won the National Book Award. His History of the Pentagon, House of War, the Pentagon and the disastrous rise of American power, won the Penn Galbraith Award, and his history of

Christian anti-Semitism, Constantine Sword, the Church and the Jews, won the National Jewish Book

Award. He published a weekly op-ed column in the Boston Globe for 23 years, and most recently

his essay about Gaza, secret sharers, Jews and Muslim,

and this long cruel war, appeared in the American Prospect.

A former Catholic priest, he is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,

and we will discuss the meaning of Christmas in spite of Vance saying,

quote, by the grace of God we will always be a Christian nation

and the heresy of the prosperity gospel.

Then we'll continue our retrospective of 2025 from the background briefing archives

and go to an interview from April the 14th of 2025 when we spoke with Stephen Simon,

a visiting professor and distinguished fellow at Dartmouth College, who served on the National Security Council staff as senior director for Middle Eastern and North African Affairs from 2011 to 2012.

He also worked on the NSC staff on counterterrorism and Middle East security policy.

Currently, he's a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft

and was formerly a fellow in International Affairs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He's the co-author, among other books of The Age of Sacred Terror,

and his latest book is Grand Delusion, The Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle

East. And he had an article at the New York Times we discussed,

The U.S. must now reckon with a hegeman in the Middle East, Israel.

Then we go to an interview from June the 9th of 2025

with Barbara Walter, the Royal Professor of International Affairs

...