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 how long can Trump and Hegseth use up four million dollar interceptors to shoot down 20,000 dollar drones in an asymmetrical war that Iran just has to stay in

While we can only win at a price we are unlikely to want to pay.

Joining us is Nicholas Harris, interim executive director at the Middle East Policy Council,

and a Senior Director for Strategy and Innovation at the New Lions Institute.

From 2016 to 2017, Nicholas served as the 10th First Lieutenant Andrew J. Basevic Jr. USA Fellow at the

Center for New American Security, and he has conducted an extensive study on Iran's proxies

in the Middle East for the National Defense University. Then we'll speak with an Iranian scholar

who was imprisoned and interrogated by Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps to get an

understanding of a brutal regime based on divine legitimacy from which the Iranian people desperately

want to be freed but have no power to do so. Joining us is Kian Tajbaksh, an Iranian-American

scholar, social scientist and urban planner. He is taught

at both American and Iranian universities and is a presidential fellow and lecturer at Columbia

University's Committee on Global Thought and a Professor of Urban Policy at Columbia's School

of International and Public Affairs and a visiting professor of international relations at New York

University. In his advocacy for democracy and human rights, he represented the Open Society

Foundation in Iran during the 2000s, and his commitment to pro-democracy efforts led to his

arrest and imprisonment during Iran's Green Movement protests in 2009.

He was one of five Iranian Americans held in Iran, whose release was negotiated by the Obama

administration as part of the Iran nuclear deal, and he was finally permitted to leave in

2016.

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