music.

Welcome to the commentary magazine daily podcast today is Tuesday, March 8, 2022.

I'm John Pudhor. It's the editor of commentary magazine with me as always executive editor,

a Greenwald high a John senior writer Christine Rosen, high Christine,

hi John associate editor Noah Rothman, high Noah, hi John. And joining us today,

having asked him five times to tell me his title, I've already forgotten it again, our old friend

Jonathan Schanzer of the foundation for the defense of democracies where he is the senior vice president

vice president of research and author of the recent book Gaza conflict 2021. He is writings on the

Gaza Israel conflict have appeared in commentary as long as as well as many other writings

about the Middle East. And we're thrilled to have him. We're going to talk a lot about the

the question of whether or not we are going to see the United States reenter the JCPOA, the

the the the vaunted Iran deal, which is a bizarre set of circumstances that we have to discuss

given what we're going to discuss first, which is of course the continuing conflagration in Ukraine.

So Noah, as we as we enter into the third week, I mean that sort of I'm not quite sure where

we are in the time. I don't think it's been a week. Hang on, it's been two weeks on Wednesday.

Two weeks on Wednesday. Okay. So as we as we are as we approach the entry of the third week of the

actual hot war here, I think it is now fair to say what everybody has been intamating or hinting at,

which is that militarily this is a calamitous disaster for the Russians that you know that

march on Kiev, the encirclement of Kiev, whatever it is has stalled out the sabotages working

even even conservative estimates of the kind of damage that the Ukrainians have done to the

Russians is kind of staggering the numbers of major pieces of military equipment,

the number of casualties that the Russians have suffered, which again, the fog of war makes it

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