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

and today we'll look into a number of stories and issues in the news.

We'll begin with both Iran and the United States saying they don't want a wider war in the

Middle East, just as President Biden is about to retaliate against Iranian proxies and possibly

Iran itself for a drone attack that killed three American soldiers and wounded 34.

Joining us at Gregory Brew, an analyst with the ERAZER Group's energy, climate and resources team,

focusing on the geopolitics of oil and gas.

In addition, he serves as the Eurasia Group's country analyst for Iran.

An historian of modern Iran, oil and U.S. foreign policy, he's the author of

the struggle for Iran, oil autocracy and the Cold War 1951 to 1954, and petroleum and progress

in Iran, oil development, and the Cold War. And he has an article at Time magazine,

The U.S. has no endgame in Yemen.

Then we'll examine the 1944 lesson from history when FDR eased out his vice president,

Henry Wallace, to replace him on the ticket with Harry Truman in the context of whether Biden should ditch Kamala Harris

at the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago

in August. Joining us is Ben Steele, Director of International Economics and the historian in

residence at the Council on Foreign Relations, as well as the author most recently of the

Marshall Plan, Dawn of the Cold War. His latest book is The World That Wasn't, Henry Wallace and the Fate of the Marshall Plan, Dawn of the Cold War.

His latest book is The World That Wasn't, Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century,

and we will discuss his article at time,

Biden owes the country a new vice president.

Then finally we'll look into today's hearing that had the big tech CEOs of MetaX, Snap, TikTok and Discord grilled by senators with bipartisan outrage. We'll also assess the impact of a Delaware

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