E238 - On the Brink with Iran w/ Dalia Dassa Kaye

American Prestige

Daniel Bessner & Derek Davison

History, News, Politics

4.8 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 24 February 2026

⏱️ 73 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Subscribe now to skip the ads and get all of our episodes. Derek and Danny are joined by Dalia Dassa Kaye to talk about the decades-long hostility between the U.S. and Iran and the current escalation between the two countries. They talk about the odds of war and the absence of clear objectives; talk of “regime change”; the legacy of the hostage crisis and the Iran-Contra hangover; the domestic incentives that make diplomacy “too costly”; the post-9/11 opportunity to mend relations and how it collapsed after the “Axis of Evil” speech; how U.S. leaders frame Iran as uniquely fanatical and unchangeable; and how Israel’s interests and domestic U.S. politics constrain policy change. Read Dalia’s book Enduring Hostility: The Making of America's Iran Policy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to American Prestige.
0:02.7	To listen ad-free, you can subscribe at Americanprostagepod.com.
0:08.3	Find the link in our show notes.
0:13.0	That's kind of conversation to your soul.
0:18.8	That's conversation.
0:22.8	It's home and the night. Hello, American Prestige listeners.
0:35.3	It's Derek.
0:35.9	I'm joined, as always, by my friend and
0:37.5	comrade, Danny Bessner, and we are very pleased to welcome to the program, Dalia Dasek.
0:42.2	She is a senior fellow at the UCLA Bercl Center for International Relations and author of
0:46.8	enduring hostility, the making of America's Iran policy, which is what we're here to discuss.
0:52.2	Dalia, thank you so much for coming on the program.
0:54.6	Thank you so much for having me. Really appreciate it.
0:58.0	So I feel like given when we're recording this, it's the day after the second round of the
1:05.5	second go at diplomacy between the Trump administration and Iran, There were some comments made after yesterday's
1:13.5	session that from Abbasaragshi, the foreign minister of Iran, from other people who were
1:21.5	involved in negotiations, it seemed to be mildly optimistic. I don't think they were all that optimistic, but they, you know,
1:29.9	sounded okay. And then this morning, before we recorded this, there was a big splashy,
1:36.8	exclusive piece in Axios about Donald Trump being fed up with diplomacy and ready to go to war.
1:42.0	So we may be on the brink of something, and I would
1:44.7	be remiss given that we're going to release this episode in a few days, and things may have
1:49.5	seriously changed by then. If I didn't ask you for sort of your interpretation of where things
	...

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