Hi everyone, I'm joined today by Alexander Mercuris and Alastair Crook, a former British diplomat and

our favorite expert on the Middle East.

And I thought we could start by talking about Iran as all Trump was elected to some extent as a peace candidate, but now he appears to be taking

the US on a path towards war with Iran. At least it doesn't seem that he wants a war, but he

has set demands on Iran, which has to be met. Otherwise, he seems to paint himself in a corner in which there would be war

so i thought a good approach to this is well i guess to outline a bit what his demands are to what

extent to what extent Iran can actually meet this demand and if he fails if they fail to meet them

does trump have any room

to maneuver to scale back?

Is there simply a very aggressive opening position, a maximalist as he always does?

Or are we effectively seeing a path to war here?

I thought, well, I guess we can start by outlining what the demands are because they did

have an agreement in the past, JCPOA, which Trump himself pulled out during his first

administration.

So what is it exactly that the United States demand from Iran to not attack it?

Well, it's very interesting if you, and you go back to that period, when he exited the JCPOA, in which at that time it was, to any extent you can say, was pretty much working.

I mean, it wasn't entirely satisfactory.

However, what his complaints were were essentially twofold.

Of course, the main complaint was, and he said, you know, we continue on this path and they'll end up with a nuclear weapon.

But his main complaints were about Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, etc.

There were proxy forces, which in his subsequent document

issued by Polonis at that time, was very clear. There were 12 demands, and they started off with a complete sort of, if you like,

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